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Latent functional diversity may accelerate microbial community responses to environmental fluctuations

View ORCID ProfileThomas P. Smith, View ORCID ProfileShorok Mombrikotb, View ORCID ProfileEmma Ransome, View ORCID ProfileDimitrios-Georgios Kontopoulos, View ORCID ProfileSamraat Pawar, View ORCID ProfileThomas Bell
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.04.14.439774
Thomas P. Smith
1Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, Silwood Park, Ascot, Berkshire SL5 7PY, UK
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  • For correspondence: thomas.smith1@imperial.ac.uk
Shorok Mombrikotb
1Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, Silwood Park, Ascot, Berkshire SL5 7PY, UK
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Emma Ransome
1Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, Silwood Park, Ascot, Berkshire SL5 7PY, UK
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Dimitrios-Georgios Kontopoulos
1Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, Silwood Park, Ascot, Berkshire SL5 7PY, UK
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Samraat Pawar
1Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, Silwood Park, Ascot, Berkshire SL5 7PY, UK
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Thomas Bell
1Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, Silwood Park, Ascot, Berkshire SL5 7PY, UK
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Abstract

Whether and how whole ecological communities can respond to climate change remains an open question. With their fast generation times and abundant functional diversity, microbes in particular harbor great potential to exhibit community-level adaptation through a combination of strain-level adaptation, phenotypic plasticity, and species sorting. However, the relative importance of these mechanisms remains unclear. Here, through a novel laboratory experiment, we show that bacterial communities can exhibit a remarkable degree of community-level adaptability through a combination of phenotypic plasticity and species sorting alone. Specifically, by culturing soil communities from a single location at six temperatures between 4°C and 50°C, we find that multiple strains well adapted to different temperatures can be isolated from the community, without immigration or strain-level adaptation. This is made possible by the ability of strains with different physiological and life history traits to “switch on” under suitable conditions, with phylogenetically distinct K-specialist taxa favoured under cooler conditions, and r-specialist taxa in warmer conditions. Our findings provide new insights into microbial community adaptation, and suggest that microbial community function is likely to respond rapidly to climatic fluctuations, through changes in species composition during repeated community assembly dynamics.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 International license.
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Posted April 14, 2021.
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Latent functional diversity may accelerate microbial community responses to environmental fluctuations
Thomas P. Smith, Shorok Mombrikotb, Emma Ransome, Dimitrios-Georgios Kontopoulos, Samraat Pawar, Thomas Bell
bioRxiv 2021.04.14.439774; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.04.14.439774
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Latent functional diversity may accelerate microbial community responses to environmental fluctuations
Thomas P. Smith, Shorok Mombrikotb, Emma Ransome, Dimitrios-Georgios Kontopoulos, Samraat Pawar, Thomas Bell
bioRxiv 2021.04.14.439774; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.04.14.439774

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