Species matter: the role of competition in the assembly of congeneric bacteria.

ABSTRACT: Interspecific competition is an important driver of community assembly in plants and animals, but phylogenetic evidence for interspecific competition in bacterial communities has been elusive. This could indicate that other processes such as habitat filtering or neutral processes are more important in bacterial community assembly. Alternatively, this could be a consequence of the lack of a consistent and meaningful species definition in bacteria. We hypothesize that competition in bacterial community assembly has gone undetected at least partly because overly broad measures of bacterial diversity units were used in previous studies. First, we tested our hypothesis in a simulation where we showed that how species are defined can dramatically affect whether phylogenetic overdispersion (a sig

SUBMITTER: Koeppel AF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3930319 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature