Abstract
In the ocean, organic particles harbour diverse bacterial communities, which collectively digest and recycle essential nutrients. Traits like motility and exo-enzyme production allow individual taxa to colonize and exploit particle resources, but it remains unclear how community dynamics emerge from these individual traits. Here we track the taxon and trait dynamics of bacteria attached to model marine particles and demonstrate that particle-attached communities undergo rapid, reproducible successions driven by ecological interactions. Motile, particle-degrading taxa are selected for during early successional stages. However, this selective pressure is later relaxed when secondary consumers invade, which are unable to use the particle resource but, instead, rely on carbon from primary degraders. This creates a trophic chain that shifts community metabolism away from the particle substrate. These results suggest that primary successions may shape particle-attached bacterial communities in the ocean and that rapid community-wide metabolic shifts could limit rates of marine particle degradation.
Highlights
In the ocean, organic particles harbour diverse bacterial communities, which collectively digest and recycle essential nutrients
To enable studies of microbial community dynamics, we developed a model system inspired by bacterial colonization of particulate organic matter (POM) in the ocean
Overall, we have demonstrated that bacterial communities colonizing nutrient-rich microhabitats undergo successional dynamics driven by two factors—dispersal limitation and facilitative interactions—that, together, drive primary successions at the scale of tens of microns
Summary
Organic particles harbour diverse bacterial communities, which collectively digest and recycle essential nutrients. Microbes from the surrounding seawater, representing a complex colonization pool of bacteria, archaea, eukaryotes and viruses, attach to these particles, eventually forming dense multi-species communities[2] Within these communities, local interactions between neighbouring cells are predicted to play an important role in shaping community-level structure and function[5,6]. At regional scales, the efficiency with which bacteria move through a particle ‘landscape’ via active or passive dispersal is likely to influence their ecological success[12,13,14,15,16,17,18] How these processes combine to give rise to dynamics at the level of the community, in the context of a diverse natural microbial assemblage, is still not well understood. The total abundance saturated at nearly 105 16S rRNA gene V4 copies per particle after only 40 h of colonization
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
