Center for Microbial Ecology and Technology (CMET), Coupure Links 653, 9000, Ghent, Belgium.
Microbial Interactions and Processes Research Group, Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, Inhoffenstr. 7, Braunschweig, 38124, Germany.
Sci Rep. 2018 Jan 10;8(1):340. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-18668-1.
The effect of initial evenness on the temporal trajectory of synthetic communities in comprehensive, low-volume microcosm studies remains unknown. We used flow cytometric fingerprinting and 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing to assess the impact of time on community structure in one hundred synthetic ecosystems of fixed richness but varying initial evenness. Both methodologies uncovered a similar reduction in diversity within synthetic communities of medium and high initial evenness classes. However, the results of amplicon sequencing showed that there were no significant differences between and within the communities in all evenness groups at the end of the experiment. Nevertheless, initial evenness significantly impacted the cell density of the community after five medium transfers. Highly even communities retained the highest cell densities at the end of the experiment. The relative abundances of individual species could be associated to particular evenness groups, suggesting that their presence was dependent on the initial evenness of the synthetic community. Our results reveal that using synthetic communities for testing ecological hypotheses requires prior assessment of initial evenness, as it impacts temporal dynamics.
初始均匀度对综合、低容量微宇宙研究中人工合成群落时间轨迹的影响尚不清楚。我们使用流式细胞术指纹图谱和 16S rRNA 基因扩增子测序来评估时间对 100 个固定丰富度但初始均匀度不同的人工合成生态系统群落结构的影响。这两种方法都揭示了中高初始均匀度类别的人工合成群落中多样性的相似减少。然而，扩增子测序的结果表明，在实验结束时，所有均匀度组的群落之间和内部都没有显著差异。尽管如此，初始均匀度在五次中等转移后显著影响了群落的细胞密度。高度均匀的群落在实验结束时保持最高的细胞密度。个别物种的相对丰度可以与特定的均匀度组相关，表明它们的存在依赖于人工合成群落的初始均匀度。我们的结果表明，使用人工合成群落来检验生态假设需要预先评估初始均匀度，因为它会影响时间动态。
