Expression patterns reveal niche diversification in a marine microbial assemblage.

ABSTRACT: Resolving the ecological niches of coexisting marine microbial taxa is challenging due to the high species richness of microbial communities and the apparent functional redundancy in bacterial genomes and metagenomes. Here, we generated over 11 million Illumina reads of protein-encoding transcripts collected from well-mixed southeastern US coastal waters to characterize gene expression patterns distinguishing the ecological roles of hundreds of microbial taxa sharing the same environment. The taxa with highest in situ growth rates (based on relative abundance of ribosomal protein transcripts) were typically not the greatest contributors to community transcription, suggesting strong top-down ecological control, and their diverse transcriptomes indicated roles as metabolic generalists. The t

SUBMITTER: Gifford SM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3554409 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature