Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Tripathi, Binu M
• Stegen, James C
• Kim, Mincheol
• Dong, Ke
• Adams, Jonathan M
• Lee, Yoo Kyung

Titel

Soil pH mediates the balance between stochastic and deterministic assembly of bacteria

Ist Teil von

• The ISME Journal, 2018-04, Vol.12 (4), p.1072-1083

Ort / Verlag

England: Nature Publishing Group

Erscheinungsjahr

2018

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Little is known about the factors affecting the relative influences of stochastic and deterministic processes that govern the assembly of microbial communities in successional soils. Here, we conducted a meta-analysis of bacterial communities using six different successional soil datasets distributed across different regions. Different relationships between pH and successional age across these datasets allowed us to separate the influences of successional age (i.e., time) from soil pH. We found that extreme acidic or alkaline pH conditions lead to assembly of phylogenetically more clustered bacterial communities through deterministic processes, whereas pH conditions close to neutral lead to phylogenetically less clustered bacterial communities with more stochasticity. We suggest that the influence of pH, rather than successional age, is the main driving force in producing trends in phylogenetic assembly of bacteria, and that pH also influences the relative balance of stochastic and deterministic processes along successional soils. Given that pH had a much stronger association with community assembly than did successional age, we evaluated whether the inferred influence of pH was maintained when studying globally distributed samples collected without regard for successional age. This dataset confirmed the strong influence of pH, suggesting that the influence of soil pH on community assembly processes occurs globally. Extreme pH conditions likely exert more stringent limits on survival and fitness, imposing strong selective pressures through ecological and evolutionary time. Taken together, these findings suggest that the degree to which stochastic vs. deterministic processes shape soil bacterial community assembly is a consequence of soil pH rather than successional age.