Biodiversity Research Centre, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Department of Zoology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Nat Ecol Evol. 2018 Jun;2(6):936-943. doi: 10.1038/s41559-018-0519-1. Epub 2018 Apr 16.
Microbial communities often exhibit incredible taxonomic diversity, raising questions regarding the mechanisms enabling species coexistence and the role of this diversity in community functioning. On the one hand, many coexisting but taxonomically distinct microorganisms can encode the same energy-yielding metabolic functions, and this functional redundancy contrasts with the expectation that species should occupy distinct metabolic niches. On the other hand, the identity of taxa encoding each function can vary substantially across space or time with little effect on the function, and this taxonomic variability is frequently thought to result from ecological drift between equivalent organisms. Here, we synthesize the powerful paradigm emerging from these two patterns, connecting the roles of function, functional redundancy and taxonomy in microbial systems. We conclude that both patterns are unlikely to be the result of ecological drift, but are inevitable emergent properties of open microbial systems resulting mainly from biotic interactions and environmental and spatial processes.
微生物群落通常表现出令人难以置信的分类多样性，这引发了关于物种共存机制以及这种多样性在群落功能中的作用的问题。一方面，许多共存但在分类上不同的微生物可以编码相同的产生能量的代谢功能，这种功能冗余与物种应该占据不同代谢小生境的预期形成对比。另一方面，编码每种功能的分类单元的身份在空间或时间上可能会发生很大变化，而对功能几乎没有影响，并且这种分类可变性通常被认为是由于等效生物之间的生态漂移造成的。在这里，我们综合了这两种模式所产生的强大范例，将功能、功能冗余和分类学在微生物系统中的作用联系起来。我们的结论是，这两种模式都不太可能是生态漂移的结果，而是开放微生物系统的必然涌现属性，主要是由生物相互作用以及环境和空间过程造成的。
