Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences
The macroevolutionary consequences of niche construction in microbial metabolism
Published: 2021-05-31
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Population Biology, Systems Biology
Microorganisms display a stunning metabolic diversity. Understanding the origin of this diversity requires understanding how macroevolutionary processes such as innovation and diversification play out in the microbial world. Metabolic networks, which govern microbial resource use, can evolve through different mechanisms, e.g. horizontal gene transfer or de novo evolution of enzymes and pathways. [...]
Understanding plant microbiomes requires a G x E framework
Published: 2021-05-20
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Plant Breeding and Genetics Life Sciences, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Plant microbiomes have become one of the hottest topics in plant biology. Driven by the increased availability of metagenome sequencing methods, analyses of plant-associated microbiomes have been skyrocketing during the last decade. They have generally taken one of two main perspectives: (1) a focus on the microbiome itself, where researchers describe microbiome diversity and attempt to [...]
Microbial effects on plant phenology and fitness
Published: 2021-02-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Plant Sciences
Plant development and the timing of developmental events (phenology) are tightly coupled with plant fitness. A variety of internal and external factors determine the timing and fitness consequences of these life-history transitions. Microbes interact with plants throughout their life-history and impact host phenology. This review summarizes current mechanistic and theoretical knowledge [...]
Soil fungal diversity and community assembly: Affected by island size or type?
Published: 2021-01-26
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Fungi have huge biodiversity and play important roles in soil biogeochemical cycling and ecosystem services in island ecosystems. Although island biogeography has been widely studied in macroorganisms, the relationship between soil fungal diversity and area in islands is less documented. Here, we examine soil fungal communities of 18 oceanic islands belonged to two types of islands (8 general [...]
Assembly processes lead to divergent soil fungal communities within and among twelve forest ecosystems along a latitudinal gradient
Published: 2021-01-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
- Latitudinal gradients provide opportunities to better understand soil fungal community assembly and its relationship with vegetation, climate, soil and ecosystem function. Understanding the mechanisms underlying community assembly is essential for predicting compositional responses to changing environments. - We quantified the relative importance of stochastic and deterministic processes in [...]
Ecological Countermeasures for Pandemic Prevention: When Ecological Restoration is a Human Health Imperative
Published: 2020-12-05
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Bacteriology, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Environmental Public Health, Epidemiology, Immunity, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Immunology of Infectious Disease, Immunopathology, Integrative Biology, International Public Health, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Microbiology, Parasitology, Pathogenic Microbiology, Population Biology, Public Health, Systems Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Veterinary Infectious Diseases, Veterinary Medicine, Veterinary Microbiology and Immunobiology, Veterinary Pathology and Pathobiology, Zoology
Ecological restoration should be regarded as a public health service. Unfortunately, the lack of quantitative linkages between environmental and human health has limited recognition of these principle. Advent of COVID-19 pandemic provides the impetus for the further discussion. We propose ecological countermeasures as highly targeted, landscape-based interventions to arrest the drivers of land [...]
How microbes can, and cannot, be used to assess soil health
Published: 2020-09-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Healthy soils are critical to the health of ecosystems, economies, and human populations. Thus, it is widely acknowledged that soil health is important to quantify, both for assessment and as a tool to help guide management strategies. What is less clear is how soil health should actually be measured, especially considering that soil health is not exclusively a product of soil physical and [...]
The quest for absolute abundance: the use of internal standards for DNA-based microbial and community ecology
Published: 2020-03-26
Subjects: Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology
To characterize microbiomes and other ecological assemblages, ecologists routinely sequence and compare loci that differ among focal taxa. Counts of these sequences convey information regarding the occurrence and relative abundances of taxa, but provide no direct measure of their absolute abundances, due to the technical limitations of the sequencing process. The relative abundances in [...]
Experimentally altered rainfall regimes and host root traits affect grassland arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal communities
Published: 2019-07-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Future climate scenarios predict changes in rainfall regimes. These changes are expected to affect plants via effects on the expression of root traits associated with water and nutrient uptake. Associated microorganisms may also respond to these new precipitation regimes, either directly in response to changes in the soil environment or indirectly in response to altered root trait expression. We [...]
Temporal dynamics of mycorrhizal fungal communities and co-associations with grassland plant communities following experimental manipulation of rainfall
Published: 2019-07-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Climate models project overall a reduction in rainfall amounts and shifts in the timing of rainfall events in mid-latitudes and sub-tropical dry regions, which threatens the productivity and diversity of grasslands. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi may help plants to cope with expected changes but may also be impacted by changing rainfall, either via the direct effects of low soil moisture on [...]
Relationships between mycorrhizal type and leaf flammability in the Australian flora
Published: 2019-07-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Evolution, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Plant Sciences
Mycorrhizal fungi have been linked to fire processes in natural ecosystems via their effects on litter decomposability but, to our knowledge, relationships between mycorrhizal fungi and leaf traits directly associated with aspects of flammability have not been studied. Here, we assessed the relationships among leaf traits and host mycorrhizal type for 77 species of Australian trees and shrubs to [...]
Resource allocation to growth or luxury consumption drives mycorrhizal responses
Published: 2019-07-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
Highly variable phenotypic responses in mycorrhizal plants challenge our functional understanding of plant-fungal mutualisms. Using non-invasive high-throughput phenotyping, we observed that arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi relieved phosphorus (P) limitation and enhanced growth of Brachypodium distachyon under P-limited conditions, while photosynthetic limitation under low nitrogen (N) was [...]
Beneath the surface: community assembly and functions of the coral skeleton microbiome
Published: 2019-05-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology
Coral microbial ecology is a burgeoning field, driven by the urgency of understanding coral health and slowing reef loss due to climate change. Coral resilience depends on its microbiota, and both the tissue and the underlying skeleton are home to a rich biodiversity of eukaryotic, bacterial and archaeal species that form an integral part of the coral holobiont. New techniques now enable detailed [...]
Sexual Selection in Bacteria?
Published: 2019-05-08
Subjects: Bacteriology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Microbiology
A main mechanism of lateral gene transfer in bacteria is transformation, where cells take up free DNA from the environment which subsequently can be recombined into the genome. Bacteria are also known to actively release DNA into the environment through secretion or lysis, which could aid uptake via transformation. Various evolutionary benefits of DNA uptake and DNA release have been proposed but [...]