Soil hydration state and interspecies interactions determine bacterial community composition across a wide range of initial inoculation ratios
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Date
2019-07-13Type
- Conference Poster
ETH Bibliography
yes
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Abstract
The complexity of natural soils presents a challenge to systematic identification and disentanglement of governing processes that shape natural bacterial communities. We use a well-characterized synthetic microbial community inoculated in porous microcosms at different hydration levels to explore the selective role of the physical environment on the resulting bacterial community composition. We hypothesize that habitat connectivity affected by the aqueous phase configuration and interspecies interactions exert significant controls over community composition (relative abundances and evenness) irrespective of initial inoculum ratios. We systematically varied the initial ratios of species (including selective removal of species) of a synthetic soil bacterial community comprised of 11 species and evaluated the resulting steady state community composition using microfluidic qPCR. We examined the null-hypothesis that community composition could predicted from known growth rates of the species to quantify the separate selective roles of the environment and interspecific interactions. The study could elucidate the role of heterogeneous environment in mediating soil bacterial community structure unobservable in mixed cultures. Moreover, the method provide a means for identifying critical community members that influence the resulting community compositing (deduced from systematic omission) in soil-like environments. Show more
Publication status
unpublishedEvent
Organisational unit
03812 - Or, Dani (emeritus) / Or, Dani (emeritus)
Notes
Poster 162 presented on July 13, 2019.More
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ETH Bibliography
yes
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