Trophic interrelationships of bacteria are important for shaping soil protist communities.

ABSTRACT: Protists occupy multiple trophic positions in soil food webs and significantly contribute to organic matter decomposition and biogeochemical cycling. Protists can ingest bacteria and fungi as main food sources while being subjected to predation of invertebrates, but our understanding of how bottom-up and top-down regulations structure protists in natural soil habitats is limited. Here, we disentangle the effects of trophic regulations to the diversity and structure of soil protists in natural settings across northern and eastern Australia. Bacterial and invertebrate diversity were identified as important drivers of the diversity of functional groups of protists. Moreover, the compositions of protistan taxonomic and functional groups were better predicted by bacteria and fungi, than by soil

SUBMITTER: Nguyen TBA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10316372 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature