Abstract
The rare biosphere is predicted to aid in maintaining functional redundancy as well as contributing to community turnover across many environments. Recent developments have partially confirmed these hypotheses, while also giving new insights into dormancy and activity among rare communities. However, less attention has been paid to the rare biosphere in soils. This study provides insight into the rare biosphere’s contribution to soil microbial diversity through the study of 781 soil samples representing 24 edaphically diverse sites. Results show that Bray–Curtis dissimilarity for time-sensitive conditionally rare taxa (CRT) does not correlate with whole community dissimilarity, while dissimilarity for space-sensitive CRT only weakly correlate with whole community dissimilarity. This adds to current understanding of spatiotemporal filtering of rare taxa, showing that CRT do not account for community variance across tested soils, but are under the same selective pressure as the whole community.
Highlights
Rare species are pervasive in microbial consortia, comprising the majority of microbial species (Curtis et al, 2002)
This paper found that pH, land use, and soil order account for the majority of community variance, these are the variables we chose to evaluate here
To assess the contribution of conditionally rare taxa (CRT) to whole community structure, we constructed three Bray– Curtis distance matrices from OTU tables for each site: (1) only OTUs identified as CRT, (2) whole communities including CRT, and (3) whole communities excluding CRT
Summary
Rare species are pervasive in microbial consortia, comprising the majority of microbial species (Curtis et al, 2002). Known as the “rare biosphere,” these members are being increasingly recognized for their importance to maintaining alpha diversity in microbial communities, as well as key ecosystem functions (Pedrós-Alió, 2007; Lynch and Neufeld, 2015). Rare members are thought to contribute to both functional redundancy and community turnover across many environments (Pedrós-Alió, 2007). Jousset et al (2017) proposed three possible functions for rare members. These include: biochemical processes such as nutrient cycling, community assembly, including resistance to disturbance or invasion and driving the functions of host-associated microbiomes, host immunity.
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