PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Pawel Sierocinski
AU  - Kim Milferstedt
AU  - Florian Bayer
AU  - Tobias Großkopf
AU  - Mark Alston
AU  - Sarah Bastkowski
AU  - David Swarbreck
AU  - Phil J Hobbs
AU  - Orkun S Soyer
AU  - Jérôme Hamelin
AU  - Angus Buckling
TI  - Predicting the structure and function of coalesced microbial communities
AID  - 10.1101/101436
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 101436
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/01/27/101436.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/01/27/101436.full
AB  - Microbial communities commonly coalesce in nature, but the consequences for resultant community structure and function is unclear. Consistent with recent theory, we demonstrate using methanogenic communities that the most productive communities in isolation dominated when communities were mixed. As a corollary of this dynamic, total methane production increased with the number of inoculated communities. The cohesion and dominance of single communities was explained by more “niche-packed” communities being both more efficient at exploiting resources and resistant to invasion, rather than a function of the average performance of component species. These results are likely to be relevant to the ecological dynamics of natural microbial communities, as well as demonstrating a simple method to predictably enhance microbial community function in biotechnology, health and agriculture.