Metabolic Overlap in Environmentally Diverse Microbial Communities

The majority of microbial communities consist of hundreds to thousands of species, creating a massive network of organisms competing for available resources within an ecosystem. In natural microbial communities it appears that many microbial species have highly redundant metabolisms and seemingly are capable of utilizing the same substrates. This is paradoxical, as theory indicates that species requiring a common resource should outcompete one another. To better understand why microbial species can co-exist, we developed Metabolic Overlap (MO) as a new metric to survey the functional redundancy of microbial communities at the genome scale across a wide variety of ecosystems. Using metagenome-assembled genomes, we surveyed over 1200 studies across ten ecosystem types. We found the highest MO in extreme (i.e., low pH/high temperature) and aquatic environments, while the lowest MO was observed in communities associated with animal hosts, or the built/engineered environment. In addition, different metabolism subcategories were explored for their degree of metabolic overlap. For instance, overlap in nitrogen metabolism was among the lowest in Animal and Engineered ecosystems, while the most was in species from the Built environment. Together, we present a metric that utilizes whole genome information to explore overlapping niches of microbes. This provides a detailed picture of potential metabolic competition and cooperation between species present in an ecosystem, indicates the main substrate types sustaining the community and serves as a valuable tool to generate hypotheses for future research.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  bioRxiv

• Publication date

  2019-05-29

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1101/653881PMID 31681424PMCID 6811665
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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