Author ORCID Identifier

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https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7337-1887

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2018

College/Unit

Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Design

Department/Program/Center

Division of Plant and Soil Sciences

Abstract

Understanding how population-level dynamics contribute to ecosystem-level processes is a primary focus of ecological research and has led to important breakthroughs in the ecology of macroscopic organisms. However, the inability to measure population-specific rates, such as growth, for microbial taxa within natural assemblages has limited ecologists’ understanding of how microbial populations interact to regulate ecosystem processes. Here, we use isotope incorporation within DNA molecules to model taxon- specific population growth in the presence of 18O-labeled water. By applying this model to phylogenetic marker sequencing data collected from stable-isotope probing studies, we estimate rates of growth, mortal- ity, and turnover for individual microbial populations within soil assemblages. When summed across the entire bacterial community, our taxon-specific estimates are within the range of other whole-assemblage measurements of bacterial turnover. Because it can be applied to environmental samples, the approach we present is broadly applicable to measuring population growth, mortality, and associated biogeochemical process rates of microbial taxa for a wide range of ecosystems and can help reveal how individual microbial populations drive biogeochemical fluxes.

Source Citation

Koch, B. J., T. A. McHugh, M. Hayer, E. Schwartz, S. J. Blazewicz, P. Dijkstra, N. van Gestel, J. C. Marks, R. L. Mau, E. M. Morrissey, J. Pett-Ridge, and B. A. Hungate. 2018. Estimating taxon-specific population dynamics in diverse microbial communities. Ecosphere 9(1): https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.2090

Comments

© 2018 Koch et al. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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