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Physiological adaptations of leaf litter microbial communities to long-term drought

Ashish A. Malik, Tami Swenson, Claudia Weihe, Eric Morrison, Jennifer B. H. Martiny, Eoin L. Brodie, Trent R. Northen, Steven D. Allison
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/631077
Ashish A. Malik
1Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Irvine, USA
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  • For correspondence: a.malik@uci.edu
Tami Swenson
2Environmental Genomics & Systems Biology Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, USA
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Claudia Weihe
1Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Irvine, USA
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Eric Morrison
3Department of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine, USA
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Jennifer B. H. Martiny
1Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Irvine, USA
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Eoin L. Brodie
4Earth & Environmental Sciences, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA
5Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management, University of California, Berkeley, USA
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Trent R. Northen
2Environmental Genomics & Systems Biology Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, USA
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Steven D. Allison
1Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Irvine, USA
3Department of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine, USA
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Abstract

Drought represents a significant stress to soil microorganisms and is known to reduce microbial activity and organic matter decomposition in Mediterranean ecosystems. However, we still lack a detailed understanding of the drought stress adaptations of microbial decomposers. We hypothesised that drought causes greater microbial allocation to stress tolerance relative to growth pathways. Here we present metatranscriptomic and metabolomic data on the physiological response of in situ microbial communities on plant leaf litter to long-term drought and pulse wetting in Californian grass and shrub ecosystems. Wetting litter after a long dry summer caused only subtle shifts in gene expression. On grass litter, communities from the decade-long ambient and reduced precipitation treatments had distinct functional profiles. The most discernable physiological adaptations to drought were production or uptake of compatible solutes to maintain cellular osmotic balance, and synthesis of capsular and extracellular polymeric substances as a mechanism to retain water. The results show a clear functional response to drought in grass litter communities with greater allocation to survival relative to growth that could affect decomposition under drought. In contrast, communities on chemically more diverse and complex shrub litter had smaller physiological differences in response to long-term drought but higher investment in resource acquisition traits across treatments, suggesting that the functional response to drought is constrained by substrate quality. Our findings suggest, for the first time in a field setting, a trade-off between microbial drought stress tolerance, resource acquisition and growth traits in leaf litter microbial communities.

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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 4.0 International license.
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Posted May 08, 2019.
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Physiological adaptations of leaf litter microbial communities to long-term drought
Ashish A. Malik, Tami Swenson, Claudia Weihe, Eric Morrison, Jennifer B. H. Martiny, Eoin L. Brodie, Trent R. Northen, Steven D. Allison
bioRxiv 631077; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/631077
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Physiological adaptations of leaf litter microbial communities to long-term drought
Ashish A. Malik, Tami Swenson, Claudia Weihe, Eric Morrison, Jennifer B. H. Martiny, Eoin L. Brodie, Trent R. Northen, Steven D. Allison
bioRxiv 631077; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/631077

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