Patterns in species persistence and biomass production in soil microcosms recovering from a disturbance reject a neutral hypothesis for bacterial community assembly.

ABSTRACT: The neutral theory of biodiversity has emerged as a major null hypothesis in community ecology. The neutral theory may sufficiently well explain the structuring of microbial communities as the extremely high microbial diversity has led to an expectation of high ecological equivalence among species. To address this possibility, we worked with microcosms of two soils; the microcosms were either exposed, or not, to a dilution disturbance which reduces community sizes and removes some very rare species. After incubation for recovery, changes in bacterial species composition in microcosms compared with the source soils were assessed by pyrosequencing of bacterial 16S rRNA genes. Our assays could detect species with a proportional abundance ≥ 0.0001 in each community, and changes in the abundanc

SUBMITTER: Zhang FG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4427283 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature