Historical contingencies and phage induction diversify bacterioplankton communities at the microscale.

ABSTRACT: In many natural environments, microorganisms decompose microscale resource patches made of complex organic matter. The growth and collapse of populations on these resource patches unfold within spatial ranges of a few hundred micrometers or less, making such microscale ecosystems hotspots of heterotrophic metabolism. Despite the potential importance of patch-level dynamics for the large-scale functioning of heterotrophic microbial communities, we have not yet been able to delineate the ecological processes that control natural populations at the microscale. Here, we address this challenge by characterizing the natural marine communities that assembled on over 1,000 individual microscale particles of chitin, the most abundant marine polysaccharide. Using low-template shotgun metagenomics an

SUBMITTER: Szabo RE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9335236 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature