Trade-Offs between Competitive Ability and Resistance to Top-Down Control in Marine Microbes.

ABSTRACT: Trade-offs between competitive ability and resistance to top-down control manifest the "kill-the-winner" hypothesis that explains how mortality caused by protists and viruses can promote bacterial diversity. However, the existence of such trade-offs has rarely been investigated in natural marine bacterial communities. To address this question, we conducted on-board dilution experiments to manipulate top-down control pressure (protists only or protists plus viruses [protists+viruses] combined) and then applied 16S rRNA gene high-throughput sequencing techniques to assess the responses of each bacterial taxon. Dilution experiments enabled us to measure the top-down-control-free growth rate as the competitive ability and top-down-control-caused mortality as the reverse of resistance to top-do

SUBMITTER: Yang JW 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10134844 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature