Centre for Ecology and Conservation, College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, Penryn, Cornwall, TR10 9FE, UK.
University College Cork, Cork T12 K8AF, Ireland.
Microbiology (Reading). 2024 Sep;170(9). doi: 10.1099/mic.0.001489.
Model microbial communities are regularly used to test ecological and evolutionary theory as they are easy to manipulate and have fast generation times, allowing for large-scale, high-throughput experiments. A key assumption for most model microbial communities is that they stably coexist, but this is rarely tested experimentally. Here we report the (dis)assembly of a five-species microbial community from a metacommunity of soil microbes that can be used for future experiments. Using reciprocal invasion-from-rare experiments we show that all species can coexist and we demonstrate that the community is stable for a long time (~600 generations). Crucially for future work, we show that each species can be identified by their plate morphologies, even after >1 year in co-culture. We characterise pairwise species interactions and produce high-quality reference genomes for each species. This stable five-species community can be used to test key questions in microbial ecology and evolution.
模式微生物群落通常被用于测试生态和进化理论，因为它们易于操作且具有快速的世代时间，允许进行大规模、高通量的实验。大多数模式微生物群落的一个关键假设是它们稳定共存，但这很少在实验中进行测试。在这里，我们报告了一种由土壤微生物群中多种微生物组成的五物种微生物群落的（去）组装，该群落可用于未来的实验。通过互惠入侵稀有实验，我们表明所有物种都可以共存，并且我们证明该群落可以长时间（约 600 代）保持稳定。对于未来的工作至关重要的是，我们表明，即使在共培养超过 1 年后，每个物种也可以通过其平板形态来识别。我们描述了种间相互作用，并为每个物种生成了高质量的参考基因组。这个稳定的五物种群落可用于测试微生物生态学和进化中的关键问题。
