Peng Ziheng, Zhang Yiran, Li Xiaomeng, Gao Hang, Liu Yu, An Yining, Qian Xun, Wei Gehong, Jiao Shuo
State Key Laboratory for Crop Stress Resistance and High-Efficiency Production, Shaanxi Key Laboratory of Agricultural and Environmental Microbiology, College of Life Sciences, Northwest A&F University, Yangling, Shaanxi, 712100, P. R. China.
College of Natural Resources and Environment, Northwest A&F University, Yangling, Shaanxi, 712100, P. R. China.
Adv Sci (Weinh). 2025 May;12(20):e2405947. doi: 10.1002/advs.202405947. Epub 2025 May 8.
The ecological niche represents a fundamental property of organisms, reflecting their diversity of utilized resources or environmental tolerances across space and time. Despite a wealth of studies revealing that not all bacteria being everywhere, the key traits that determine niche breadth have remained unclear. Here, bacterial niche breadth based on a large-scale soil survey across a wide range of environmental gradients at a national-scale is characterized, and evaluated their life-history traits utilizing over 2000 bacterial genomic datasets from the Genome Taxonomy Database (GTDB). A positive relationship between gene functional diversity and niche breadth is found, and identified a key set of bacterial traits associated with niche breadth, which are assigned to five life-history categories, encompassing growth, competition, stress tolerance, resource acquisition, and dispersal ability. The traits of these categories are captured by distinct clusters in the full dimensionality of trait space, suggesting that a broad-niche taxon may indeed possess multiple facets of life history strategies essential for survival in diverse environments. Bacterial taxa with wider niche breadth maximized a diversity of traits associated with different life history strategies, whereas specialists tended to harbor a smaller number of traits associated with fewer life history strategies. Together, this study offers new insights into developing a trait-based understanding of bacterial niche breadth from the perspective of life history theory.
生态位代表了生物体的一个基本属性，反映了它们在空间和时间上所利用资源的多样性或环境耐受性。尽管大量研究表明并非所有细菌都无处不在，但决定生态位宽度的关键特征仍不明确。在此，基于全国范围内广泛环境梯度的大规模土壤调查对细菌生态位宽度进行了表征，并利用来自基因组分类数据库（GTDB）的2000多个细菌基因组数据集评估了它们的生活史特征。发现基因功能多样性与生态位宽度之间存在正相关关系，并确定了一组与生态位宽度相关的关键细菌特征，这些特征被归为五个生活史类别，包括生长、竞争、胁迫耐受性、资源获取和扩散能力。这些类别的特征在性状空间的全维度中由不同的聚类捕获，这表明具有广泛生态位的分类群可能确实拥有在不同环境中生存所必需的多种生活史策略。生态位宽度较宽的细菌分类群最大化了与不同生活史策略相关的性状多样性，而特化物种往往具有较少与较少生活史策略相关的性状。总之，本研究从生活史理论的角度为基于性状理解细菌生态位宽度提供了新的见解。
