Imperial College London
Alternate

ProfessorThomasBell

Faculty of Natural Sciences, Department of Life Sciences (Silwood Park)

Professor of Microbial Ecology
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 2268thomas.bell

 
 
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Location

 

MunroSilwood Park

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Rivett:2018:10.1038/s41564-018-0180-0,
author = {Rivett, DW and Bell, T},
doi = {10.1038/s41564-018-0180-0},
journal = {Nature microbiology},
pages = {767--772},
title = {Abundance determines the functional role of bacterial phylotypes in complex communities.},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41564-018-0180-0},
volume = {3},
year = {2018}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - Bacterial communities are essential for the functioning of the Earth's ecosystems <sup>1</sup> . A key challenge is to quantify the functional roles of bacterial taxa in nature to understand how the properties of ecosystems change over time or under different environmental conditions <sup>2</sup> . Such knowledge could be used, for example, to understand how bacteria modulate biogeochemical cycles <sup>3</sup> , and to engineer bacterial communities to optimize desirable functional processes <sup>4</sup> . Communities of bacteria are, however, extraordinarily complex with hundreds of interacting taxa in every gram of soil and every millilitre of pond water <sup>5</sup> . Little is known about how the tangled interactions within natural bacterial communities mediate ecosystem functioning, but high levels of bacterial diversity have led to the assumption that many taxa are functionally redundant <sup>6</sup> . Here, we pinpoint the bacterial taxa associated with keystone functional roles, and show that rare and common bacteria are implicated in fundamentally different types of ecosystem functioning. By growing hundreds of bacterial communities collected from a natural aquatic environment (rainwater-filled tree holes) under the same environmental conditions, we show that negative statistical interactions among abundant phylotypes drive variation in broad functional measures (respiration, metabolic potential, cell yield), whereas positive interactions between rare phylotypes influence narrow functional measures (the capacity of the communities to degrade specific substrates). The results alter our understanding of bacterial ecology by demonstrating that unique components of complex communities are associated with different types of ecosystem functioning.
AU  - Rivett,DW
AU  - Bell,T
DO  - 10.1038/s41564-018-0180-0
EP  - 772
PY  - 2018///
SN  - 2058-5276
SP  - 767
TI  - Abundance determines the functional role of bacterial phylotypes in complex communities.
T2  - Nature microbiology
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41564-018-0180-0
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/77718
VL  - 3
ER  -
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