PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Luis Miguel de Jesús Astacio
AU  - Kaumudi H. Prabhakara
AU  - Zeqian Li
AU  - Harry Mickalide
AU  - Seppe Kuehn
TI  - Closed microbial communities self-organize to persistently cycle carbon
AID  - 10.1101/2020.05.28.121848
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.05.28.121848
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/05/30/2020.05.28.121848.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/05/30/2020.05.28.121848.full
AB  - Nutrient cycling is an emergent property of ecosystems at all scales, from microbial communities to the entire biosphere. Understanding how nutrient cycles emerge from the collective metabolism of ecosystems is a challenging problem. Here we use closed microbial ecosystems (CES), hermetically sealed consortia that sustain nutrient cycles when provided with only light, to learn how microbial communities cycle carbon. A new technique for quantifying carbon exchange shows that CES comprised of an alga and diverse bacteria self-organize to robustly cycle carbon. Comparing a library of CES, we find that carbon cycling does not depend strongly on the taxonomy of the bacteria present. Metabolic profiling reveals functional redundancy across CES: despite strong taxonomic differences, self-organized CES exhibit a conserved set of metabolic capabilities.Summary Closed microbial communities of algae and bacteria self-organize to robustly cycle carbon via emergent metabolite exchange.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.