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Influence of Sustainability and Immigration in Assembling Bacterial Populations of Known Size and Function

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Abstract

The rational assembly of microbial communities to perform desired functions would be of great practical benefit to society. Broadly speaking, there are two major theoretical foundations for microbial community assembly: one based on island biogeography theory and another based on niche theory. In this study, we compared a parameter from each theory (immigration rate and sustainability, respectively) to ascertain which was more influential in establishing a functional bacterial population in phenol degrading activated sludge over a 30-day period. Two bacterial strains originally isolated from activated sludge, but differing in their ability to sustain a population in this environment, were repeatedly added to activated sludge reactors at different doses. The resulting size of each population was monitored by competitive polymerase chain reaction. Large, unexpected, yet reproducible fluctuations in population sizes were observed. Irrespective of this, difference in the ability to sustain a population in this environment, overshadowed the influence of 100-fold differences in immigration rate.

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Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Rob Griffiths and Bill Sloan for discussions and comments on the study. We are grateful to Russell Standish and Nicolas Barraud for making the base line predictions of population abundance. MM was supported by NERC with a CEH nonthematic research grant (GR3/13121) and by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), Japan.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences, CMBB, University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, 2052, Australia

    Mike Manefield

  2. CEH, Mansfield Road, Oxford, OX1 3SR, UK

    Mike Manefield & Andrew Whiteley

  3. Marine Biotechnology Institute, Kamaishi City, Iwate, 026-0001, Japan

    Mike Manefield & Kazuya Watanabe

  4. Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Newcastle University, Newcastle, NE1 7RU, UK

    Tom Curtis

Authors
  1. Mike Manefield
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  2. Andrew Whiteley
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  3. Tom Curtis
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  4. Kazuya Watanabe
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Correspondence to Mike Manefield.

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Manefield, M., Whiteley, A., Curtis, T. et al. Influence of Sustainability and Immigration in Assembling Bacterial Populations of Known Size and Function. Microb Ecol 53, 348–354 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-006-9167-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-006-9167-0

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