Galbraith Elroy, Convertino Matteo
Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Hokkaido University, Sapporo 060-0814, Japan.
bluEco Lab, Institute of Environment and Ecology, Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen 518055, China.
Entropy (Basel). 2021 Nov 8;23(11):1471. doi: 10.3390/e23111471.
The microbiome emits informative signals of biological organization and environmental pressure that aid ecosystem monitoring and prediction. Are the many signals reducible to a habitat-specific portfolio that characterizes ecosystem health? Does an optimally structured microbiome imply a resilient microbiome? To answer these questions, we applied our novel Eco-Evo Mandala to bacterioplankton data from four habitats within the Great Barrier Reef, to explore how patterns in community structure, function and genetics signal habitat-specific organization and departures from theoretical optimality. The Mandala revealed communities departing from optimality in habitat-specific ways, mostly along structural and functional traits related to bacterioplankton abundance and interaction distributions (reflected by ϵ and λ as power law and exponential distribution parameters), which are not linearly associated with each other. River and reef communities were similar in their relatively low abundance and interaction disorganization (low ϵ and λ) due to their protective structured habitats. On the contrary, lagoon and estuarine inshore reefs appeared the most disorganized due to the ocean temperature and biogeochemical stress. Phylogenetic distances () were minimally informative in characterizing bacterioplankton organization. However, dominant populations, such as Proteobacteria, Bacteroidetes, and Cyanobacteria, were largely responsible for community patterns, being generalists with a large functional gene repertoire (high ) that increases resilience. The relative balance of these populations was found to be habitat-specific and likely related to systemic environmental stress. The position on the Mandala along the three fundamental traits, as well as fluctuations in this ecological state, conveys information about the microbiome's health (and likely ecosystem health considering bacteria-based multitrophic dependencies) as divergence from the expected relative optimality. The Eco-Evo Mandala emphasizes how habitat and the microbiome's interaction network topology are first- and second-order factors for ecosystem health evaluation over taxonomic species richness. Unhealthy microbiome communities and unbalanced microbes are identified not by macroecological indicators but by mapping their impact on the collective proportion and distribution of interactions, which regulates the microbiome's ecosystem function.
微生物群落会发出有关生物组织和环境压力的信息性信号，有助于生态系统监测和预测。众多信号能否简化为一个特定栖息地的组合，以表征生态系统健康状况？结构最优的微生物群落是否意味着具有恢复力的微生物群落？为了回答这些问题，我们将新颖的生态 - 进化曼荼罗应用于大堡礁四个栖息地的浮游细菌数据，以探究群落结构、功能和遗传学模式如何表明特定栖息地的组织情况以及与理论最优状态的偏离。曼荼罗揭示了群落以特定栖息地的方式偏离最优状态，主要是沿着与浮游细菌丰度和相互作用分布相关的结构和功能特征（由作为幂律和指数分布参数的ϵ和λ反映），这些特征彼此并非线性相关。河流和珊瑚礁群落由于其保护性的结构化栖息地，在丰度和相互作用无序性方面相对较低（低ϵ和λ），情况相似。相反，泻湖和河口近岸珊瑚礁由于海洋温度和生物地球化学压力，显得最为无序。系统发育距离（）在表征浮游细菌组织方面信息最少。然而，优势种群，如变形菌门、拟杆菌门和蓝细菌门，在很大程度上决定了群落模式，它们是具有大量功能基因库（高）的通才，这增加了恢复力。发现这些种群的相对平衡是特定于栖息地的，并且可能与系统性环境压力有关。在曼荼罗上沿着三个基本特征的位置，以及这种生态状态的波动，传达了关于微生物群落健康状况的信息（考虑到基于细菌的多营养依赖性，可能也反映了生态系统健康状况），即与预期相对最优状态的差异。生态 - 进化曼荼罗强调，栖息地和微生物群落的相互作用网络拓扑结构是生态系统健康评估中相对于分类物种丰富度的一阶和二阶因素。不健康的微生物群落和失衡的微生物不是通过宏观生态指标来识别，而是通过描绘它们对相互作用的集体比例和分布的影响来识别，而这种影响调节着微生物群落的生态系统功能。
