2017 ESA Annual Meeting (August 6 -- 11)

OOS 3-5 - Conservation of species- and trait-based network interactions during microbial community assembly in extremely acid environment

Monday, August 7, 2017: 2:50 PM
Portland Blrm 256, Oregon Convention Center
Jialiang Kuang1, Marc Cadotte2, Yongjian Chen1, Haoyue Shu1, Jun Liu1, Linxing Chen1, Zhengshuang Hua1, Wensheng Shu3, Jizhong Zhou4 and Linan Huang1, (1)School of Life Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China, (2)Department of Biological Sciences, University of Toronto - Scarborough, Toronto, ON, Canada, (3)School of Life Sciences, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China, (4)Institute for Environmental Genomics and Department of Microbiology and Plant Biology, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK
Background/Question/Methods

Understanding microbial interactions is essential to decipher the mechanisms of community assembly and their effects on ecosystem functioning, however, the conservation of species- and trait-based network interactions along environmental gradient remains largely unknown. Here, by using the network-based analyses with 3 paralleled data sets derived from 16S rRNA gene pyrosequencing, functional microarray and predicted metagenome, we test our hypothesis that the network interactions of traits are more conserved than those of taxonomic measures, with significantly lower variation of network characteristics along the environmental gradient in acid mine drainage.

Results/Conclusions

The results showed that although the overall network characteristics remained similar, the structural variation was significantly lower at trait levels. The higher conserved individual node topological properties, such as the centralities of betweenness and eigenvector, at trait level rather than at species level indicated that the responses of diverse traits remained relatively consistent even though different species played key roles under different environmental conditions. Additionally, the randomization tests revealed that it could not reject the null hypothesis that species-based correlations were random, while the tests suggested that correlation patterns of traits were non-random. Furthermore, relationships between trait-based network characteristics and environmental properties implied that trait-based networks might be more useful in reflecting the variation of ecosystem function. Taken together, our results suggest that deterministic trait-based community assembly results in greater conservation of network interaction, which may ensure ecosystem function across environmental regimes, emphasizing the importance of measuring the complexity and conservation of network interaction in evaluating the ecosystem stability and functioning.