Characterizing a stable five-species microbial community for use in experimental evolution and ecology.

ABSTRACT: Model microbial communities are regularly used to test ecological and evolutionary theory as they are easy to manipulate and have fast generation times, allowing for large-scale, high-throughput experiments. A key assumption for most model microbial communities is that they stably coexist, but this is rarely tested experimentally. Here we report the (dis)assembly of a five-species microbial community from a metacommunity of soil microbes that can be used for future experiments. Using reciprocal invasion-from-rare experiments we show that all species can coexist and we demonstrate that the community is stable for a long time (~600 generations). Crucially for future work, we show that each species can be identified by their plate morphologies, even after >1 year in co-culture. We characteris

SUBMITTER: Castledine M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11412253 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature