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Contributed Talk

Session: : Invasion: Community Effects 2

COS 263-6 - Unexpected shifts in microbiome structure and function following community coalescence

Thursday, August 10, 2023
11:15 AM – 11:30 AM PDT
Location: D139
Abstract: Abstract
















Community coalescence or the mixing of intact ecological assemblages is unique to microbial systems. During coalescence events, entire microbial communities, with distinct eco-evolutionary histories are mixed to form novel outcome assemblages (e.g., fecal microbiome transplants, river confluences, or soil inoculations). As such, coalescence events represent complex multispecies invasions, with a variety of potential engraftment (i.e., community re-arrangement) outcomes. While a wealth of literature exists on single-species invasions, the ecological processes that govern community coalescence and microbial engraftment are still poorly investigated. Here, we use a soil mesocosm experimental system encompassing three levels of diversity to parametrize the processes governing microbial community coalescence. We selected three soils from systems with varying degrees of similarity in edaphic and eco-evolutionary history and used a dilution-to-extinction approach to create a soil diversity gradient. Soils were then mixed in pairs and sampled over time after community coalescence (i.e., 1, 5, 15, and 30 after the coalescence). We used a combination of bacterial 16S rRNA high-throughput sequencing, Biolog EcoPlate assays, and a series of enzymatic essays to track temporal shifts in community taxonomy, metabolic function, and enzymatic activities, respectively. In brief, our results generally suggest that the outcome of community coalescence is strongly associated with the level of similarity between community types. Besides, we also observed the emergence of novel metabolic functions and previously undetected taxa following coalescence. This suggests that coalescence can lead to an expansion of niche breadth resulting in yet-underexplored patterns




of coalescence-driven emergent properties. Taken together, our study provides new model parametrization that can help to advance the study of community coalescence with broad implications across divergent systems.