Taxa-function robustness in microbial communities.

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND:The species composition of a microbial community is rarely fixed and often experiences fluctuations of varying degrees and at varying frequencies. These perturbations to a community's taxonomic profile naturally also alter the community's functional profile-the aggregate set of genes encoded by community members-ultimately altering the community's overall functional capacities. The magnitude of such functional changes and the specific shift that will occur in each function, however, are strongly dependent on how genes are distributed across community members' genomes. This gene distribution, in turn, is determined by the taxonomic composition of the community and would markedly differ, for example, between communities composed of species with similar genomic content vs. communit

SUBMITTER: Eng A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5833107 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature