Environmental Selection, Dispersal, and Organism Interactions Shape Community Assembly in High-Throughput Enrichment Culturing.

ABSTRACT: A central goal of microbial ecology is to identify and quantify the forces that lead to observed population distributions and dynamics. However, these forces, which include environmental selection, dispersal, and organism interactions, are often difficult to assess in natural environments. Here, we present a method that links microbial community structures with selective and stochastic forces through highly replicated subsampling and enrichment of a single environmental inoculum. Specifically, groundwater from a well-studied natural aquifer was serially diluted and inoculated into nearly 1,000 aerobic and anaerobic nitrate-reducing cultures, and the final community structures were evaluated with 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing. We analyzed the frequency and abundance of individual operat

SUBMITTER: Justice NB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5626985 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature