Metabolic Overlap in Environmentally Diverse Microbial Communities.

ABSTRACT: The majority of microbial communities consist of hundreds to thousands of species, creating a massive network of organisms competing for available resources within an ecosystem. In natural microbial communities, it appears that many microbial species have highly redundant metabolisms and seemingly are capable of utilizing the same substrates. This is paradoxical, as theory indicates that species requiring a common resource should outcompete one another. To better understand why microbial species can coexist, we developed metabolic overlap (MO) as a new metric to survey the functional redundancy of microbial communities at the genome scale across a wide variety of ecosystems. Using metagenome-assembled genomes, we surveyed nearly 1,000 studies across nine ecosystem types. We found the highe

SUBMITTER: Hester ER 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6811665 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature