Abundance determines the functional role of bacterial phylotypes in complex communities.

ABSTRACT: Bacterial communities are essential for the functioning of the Earth's ecosystems ¹ . A key challenge is to quantify the functional roles of bacterial taxa in nature to understand how the properties of ecosystems change over time or under different environmental conditions ² . Such knowledge could be used, for example, to understand how bacteria modulate biogeochemical cycles ³ , and to engineer bacterial communities to optimize desirable functional processes ⁴ . Communities of bacteria are, however, extraordinarily complex with hundreds of interacting taxa in every gram of soil and every millilitre of pond water ⁵ . Little is known about how the tangled interactions within natural bacterial communities mediate ecosystem functioning, b

SUBMITTER: Rivett DW 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6065991 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature