Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 637551, Singapore.
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Davis, CA, 95616, USA.
Environ Microbiol. 2019 Oct;21(10):3751-3764. doi: 10.1111/1462-2920.14725. Epub 2019 Jul 14.
Trait-based approaches are increasingly gaining importance in community ecology, as a way of finding general rules for the mechanisms driving changes in community structure and function under the influence of perturbations. Frameworks for life-history strategies have been successfully applied to describe changes in plant and animal communities upon disturbance. To evaluate their applicability to complex bacterial communities, we operated replicated wastewater treatment bioreactors for 35 days and subjected them to eight different disturbance frequencies of a toxic pollutant (3-chloroaniline), starting with a mixed inoculum from a full-scale treatment plant. Relevant ecosystem functions were tracked and microbial communities assessed through metagenomics and 16S rRNA gene sequencing. Combining a series of ordination, statistical and network analysis methods, we associated different life-history strategies with microbial communities across the disturbance range. These strategies were evaluated using tradeoffs in community function and genotypic potential, and changes in bacterial genus composition. We further compared our findings with other ecological studies and adopted a semi-quantitative competitors, stress-tolerants, ruderals (CSR) classification. The framework reduces complex data sets of microbial traits, functions and taxa into ecologically meaningful components to help understand the system response to disturbance and hence represents a promising tool for managing microbial communities.
基于特征的方法在群落生态学中越来越重要，它是一种寻找在扰动影响下驱动群落结构和功能变化的机制的一般规律的方法。基于生活史策略的框架已成功应用于描述植物和动物群落在受干扰后的变化。为了评估它们在复杂细菌群落中的适用性，我们在 35 天内操作了复制的废水处理生物反应器，并对有毒污染物（3-氯苯胺）进行了 8 种不同的干扰频率，起始物为来自大型处理厂的混合接种物。通过宏基因组学和 16S rRNA 基因测序来跟踪相关的生态系统功能并评估微生物群落。通过一系列排序、统计和网络分析方法，我们将不同的生活史策略与干扰范围内的微生物群落联系起来。使用群落功能和基因型潜力的权衡以及细菌属组成的变化来评估这些策略。我们还将我们的发现与其他生态研究进行了比较，并采用了半定量的竞争者、耐受压力者、杂草（CSR）分类。该框架将微生物特征、功能和分类群的复杂数据集简化为具有生态意义的成分，以帮助理解系统对干扰的响应，因此代表了管理微生物群落的有前途的工具。
