Facilitation in the soil microbiome does not necessarily lead to niche expansion
Zhou, Xue; Leite, Márcio F.A.; Zhang, Zhenqing; Tian, Lei; Chang, Jingjing; Ma, Lina; Li, Xiujun; van Veen, Johannes A.; Tian, Chunjie; Kuramae, Eiko E.
(2021) Environmental Microbiomes, volume 16, issue 1, pp. 1 - 13
(Article)
Abstract
Background: The soil microbiome drives soil ecosystem function, and soil microbial functionality is directly linked to interactions between microbes and the soil environment. However, the context-dependent interactions in the soil microbiome remain largely unknown. Results: Using latent variable models (LVMs), we disentangle the biotic and abiotic interactions of soil bacteria,
... read more
fungi and environmental factors using the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau soil ecosystem as a model. Our results show that soil bacteria and fungi not only interact with each other but also shift from competition to facilitation or vice versa depending on environmental variation; that is, the nature of their interactions is context-dependent. Conclusions: Overall, elevation is the environmental gradient that most promotes facilitative interactions among microbes but is not a major driver of soil microbial community composition, as evidenced by variance partitioning. The larger the tolerance of a microbe to a specific environmental gradient, the lesser likely it is to interact with other soil microbes, which suggests that facilitation does not necessarily lead to niche expansion.
show less
Download/Full Text
Keywords: C/N ratio, Elevation, Facilitation, Latent variable modelling, Microbial co-occurrence, Stress gradient hypothesis, Microbiology, Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology, Genetics
ISSN: 1944-3277
Publisher: BioMed Central
Note: Funding Information: This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41807146,41571255), the Science Foundation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDA23070501, XDB15030103), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2016YFC0501202), the Key Research Project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (KFZD-SW-112), the Cooperative Project between CAS and Jilin Province of China (2019SYHZ0039), the Science and Technology Development Project of Changchun City of China (18DY019) and Science and Technology Development Project of Jilin Province of China (20180519002JH, 20190303070SF). Publisher Copyright: © 2021, The Author(s).
(Peer reviewed)
See more statistics about this item