Interactions in self-assembled microbial communities saturate with diversity.

ABSTRACT: How the diversity of organisms competing for or sharing resources influences community function is an important question in ecology but has rarely been explored in natural microbial communities. These generally contain large numbers of species making it difficult to disentangle how the effects of different interactions scale with diversity. Here, we show that changing diversity affects measures of community function in relatively simple communities but that increasing richness beyond a threshold has little detectable effect. We generated self-assembled communities with a wide range of diversity by growth of cells from serially diluted seawater on brown algal leachate. We subsequently isolated the most abundant taxa from these communities via dilution-to-extinction in order to compare produ

SUBMITTER: Yu X 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6775987 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature