A global overview of the trophic structure within microbiomes across ecosystems

Environ Int. 2021 Feb 20;151:106438. doi: 10.1016/j.envint.2021.106438. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTThe colossal project of mapping the microbiome on Earth is rapidly advancing, with a focus on individual microbial groups. However, a global assessment of the associations between predatory protists and their bacterial prey is still missing at a cross-ecosystem level. This knowledge is critical to better understand the importance of top-down links in structuring microbiomes. Here, we examined 38 sequence-based datasets of paired bacterial and protistan taxa, covering 3,178 samples from diverse habitats including freshwater, marine and soils. We show that community profiles of protists and bacteria strongly correlated across and within habitats, with trophic microbiome structures fundamentally differing across habitats. Soils hosted the most heterogenous and diverse microbiomes. Protist communities were dominated by predators in soils and phototrophs in aquatic environments. This led to changes in the ratio of total protists to bacteria richness, which was highest in marine, while that of predatory protists to bacteria was highest in soils. Taxon richness and relative abundance of predatory protists positively correlated with bacterial richness in marine habitats. These links differed between soils, predatory protist richness and the relative abundance of predatory protists positively correlated with bacterial richness in forest and grassland soils, but not in agricultural soi...

Source: Environment International - February 23, 2021 Category: Environmental Health Authors: Wu Xiong Alexandre Jousset Rong Li Manuel Delgado-Baquerizo Mohammad Bahram Ramiro Logares Benjamin Wilden Gerard Arjen de Groot Nathalie Amacker George A Kowalchuk Qirong Shen Stefan Geisen Source Type: research