Abstract
Assigning ecological roles to bacterial taxa remains imperative to understanding how microbial communities will respond to changing environmental conditions. Here we analyze the genus Curtobacterium, as it was found to be the most abundant taxon in a leaf litter community in southern California. Traditional characterization of this taxon predominantly associates it as the causal pathogen in the agricultural crops of dry beans. Therefore, we sought to investigate whether the abundance of this genus was because of its role as a plant pathogen or another ecological role. By collating >24,000 16S rRNA sequences with 120 genomes across the Microbacteriaceae family, we show that Curtobacterium has a global distribution with a predominant presence in soil ecosystems. Moreover, this genus harbors a high diversity of genomic potential for the degradation of carbohydrates, specifically with regards to structural polysaccharides. We conclude that Curtobacterium may be responsible for the degradation of organic matter within litter communities.
Highlights
Traditional ecological characterization of microorganisms often narrowly defines their roles in terms of interspecies interactions
We present the first global survey of Curtobacterium and show that it is ubiquitous in a variety of ecosystems (Figure 1) it is most abundant in terrestrial ecosystems, and a majority of sequences are associated with plants and soil
This observation is in accordance with past studies of Curtobacterium that attribute its habitat to plants and the related phyllosphere (Komagata et al, 1965; Behrendt et al, 2002)
Summary
Traditional ecological characterization of microorganisms often narrowly defines their roles in terms of interspecies interactions Such limited classification of interactions ignores the dynamic alterations of life cycles indicative of microorganisms in changing environmental conditions (Redman et al, 2001; Kogel et al, 2006; Newton et al, 2010). Endophytic fungi transition to decomposers after the leaves fall off its host plant (Osono, 2006; Korkama-Rajala et al, 2008). Such flexibility in ecological roles may explain why Curtobacterium, a bacterial genus traditionally viewed as a plant pathogen (Hsieh et al, 2005), was recently found to be the dominant bacterium in the leaf litter of a Mediterranean-like grassland community (Matulich et al, 2015). Most studies investigating Curtobacterium focus on its role as an economically important plant
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