Combined niche and neutral effects in a microbial wastewater treatment community

It has long been assumed that differences in the relative abundance of taxa in microbial communities reflect differences in environmental conditions. Here we show that in the economically and environmentally important microbial communities in a wastewater treatment plant, the population dynamics are...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS 2010-08, Vol.107 (35), p.15345-15350
Main Authors: Ofiţeru, Irina Dana, Lunn, Mary, Curtis, Thomas P., Wells, George F., Criddle, Craig S., Francis, Christopher A., Sloan, William T., Tiedje, James M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Abundance
Algorithms
Ammonia
Bacteria
Bacteria - growth & development
Bacteria - metabolism
Biological Sciences
Biomass
Birth
Calibration
Communities
DNA, Bacterial - analysis
Ecological modeling
Ecosystem
Environmental conditions
Environmental factors
Heterotrophs
Immigration
Microbial activity
Microbiology
Migrant communities
Models, Biological
Mortality
Niches
Parametric models
Physical Sciences
Plant communities
Polymorphism, Restriction Fragment Length
Population Dynamics
relative abundance
Reproduction
Sewage - microbiology
Statistical variance
Taxa
Taxonomy
Time Factors
Time series
Wastewater treatment
Water Microbiology
Water treatment plants
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Summary:It has long been assumed that differences in the relative abundance of taxa in microbial communities reflect differences in environmental conditions. Here we show that in the economically and environmentally important microbial communities in a wastewater treatment plant, the population dynamics are consistent with neutral community assembly, where chance and random immigration play an important and predictable role in shaping the communities. Using dynamic observations, we demonstrate a straightforward calibration of a purely neutral model and a parsimonious method to incorporate environmental influence on the reproduction (or birth) rate of individual taxa. The calibrated model parameters are biologically plausible, with the population turnover and diversity in the heterotrophic community being higher than for the ammonia oxidizing bacteria (AOB) and immigration into AOB community being relatively higher. When environmental factors were incorporated more of the variance in the observations could be explained but immigration and random reproduction and deaths remained the dominant driver in determining the relative abundance of the common taxa. Consequently we suggest that neutral community models should be the foundation of any description of an open biological system.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.1000604107