RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Stress priming affects fungal competition – evidence from a combined experimental and modeling study
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2020.03.04.976357
DO 10.1101/2020.03.04.976357
A1 Felix Wesener
A1 Aleksandra Szymczak
A1 Matthias C. Rillig
A1 Britta Tietjen
YR 2020
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/03/05/2020.03.04.976357.abstract
AB Priming, an inducible stress defense strategy that prepares an organism for an impending stress event, is common in microbes and has been studied mostly in isolated organisms or populations. How the benefits of priming change in the microbial community context and, vice versa, whether priming influences competition between organisms, remains largely unknown. In this combined experimental and modeling study, we developed a cellular automaton model based on dedicated data of different isolates of soil fungi in isolation and pairwise competition experiments. With the model, we simulated growth of the ascomycete Chaetomium elatum competing against other fungi to understand which species traits influence the benefit of priming and the effect of priming on competition. We showed that competition changes the priming benefit compared to isolated growth, and that it depends not only on the primeable species itself, but also on the competitors’ traits such as growth rate, primeability and stress susceptibility. In addition, we showed that priming benefits were not always reflected in the competitive outcome. With this study, we transferred insights on priming from studies in isolation to the community context. This is an important step towards understanding the role of inducible defenses in microbial community assembly and composition.