Veresoglou Stavros D, Johnson David
State Key Laboratory of Biocontrol, School of Ecology, Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen, 518107, China.
Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Michael Smith Building, University of Manchester, Manchester, M139PT, UK.
Trends Microbiol. 2023 Nov;31(11):1111-1117. doi: 10.1016/j.tim.2023.05.008. Epub 2023 Jun 8.
Symbioses involving microorganisms prevail in nature and are key to regulating numerous ecosystem processes and in driving evolution. A major concern in understanding the ecology of symbioses involving microorganisms arises in the effectiveness of sampling strategies to capture the contrasting size of organisms involved. In many mutualisms, including mycorrhizas and gut systems, hosts interact simultaneously with multiple smaller sized mutualists, the identity of which determines success for the host. This complicates quantifying the diversity of mutualisms because sampling techniques fail to capture effectively the diversity of each partner. Here we propose the use of species-area relationships (SARs) to explicitly consider the spatial scale of microbial partners in symbioses, which we propose will improve our understanding of the ecology of mutualisms.
涉及微生物的共生现象在自然界中普遍存在，是调节众多生态系统过程和推动进化的关键。在理解涉及微生物的共生生态学时，一个主要问题在于采样策略捕捉所涉及生物体不同大小的有效性。在许多共生关系中，包括菌根和肠道系统，宿主同时与多个较小的共生伙伴相互作用，这些伙伴的身份决定了宿主的成功。这使得共生关系多样性的量化变得复杂，因为采样技术无法有效捕捉每个伙伴的多样性。在这里，我们建议使用物种 - 面积关系（SARs）来明确考虑共生中微生物伙伴的空间尺度，我们认为这将增进我们对共生生态的理解。
