Turnover in Life-Strategies Recapitulates Marine Microbial Succession Colonizing Model Particles.

Particulate organic matter (POM) in the ocean sustains diverse communities of bacteria that mediate the remineralization of organic complex matter. However, the variability of these particles and of the environmental conditions surrounding them present a challenge to the study of the ecological processes shaping particle-associated communities and their function. In this work, we utilize data from experiments in which coastal water communities are grown on synthetic particles to ask which are the most important ecological drivers of their assembly and associated traits.

Illuminating microbial species-specific effects on organic matter remineralization in marine sediments.

Marine microorganisms play a fundamental role in the global carbon cycle by mediating the sequestration of organic matter in ocean waters and sediments. A better understanding of how biological factors, such as microbial community composition, influence the lability and fate of organic matter is needed. Here, we explored the extent to which organic matter remineralization is influenced by species-specific metabolic capabilities.

Physics-based prediction of biopolymer degradation.

In the natural environment, insoluble biomatter provides a preeminent source of carbon for bacteria. Its degradation by microbial communities thus plays a major role in the global carbon-cycle. The prediction of degradation processes and their sensitivity to changes in environmental conditions can therefore provide critical insights into globally occurring environmental adaptations.

Modular Assembly of Polysaccharide-Degrading Marine Microbial Communities.

Understanding the principles that govern the assembly of microbial communities across earth's biomes is a major challenge in modern microbial ecology. This pursuit is complicated by the difficulties of mapping functional roles and interactions onto communities with immense taxonomic diversity and of identifying the scale at which microbes interact [1]. To address this challenge, here, we focused on the bacterial communities that colonize and degrade particulate organic matter in the ocean [2-4].

Strain-level diversity drives alternative community types in millimetre-scale granular biofilms.

Microbial communities are often highly diverse in their composition, both at a coarse-grained taxonomic level, such as genus, and at a highly resolved level, such as strains, within species. This variability can be driven by either extrinsic factors such as temperature and or by intrinsic ones, for example demographic fluctuations or ecological interactions. The relative contributions of these factors and the taxonomic level at which they influence community composition remain poorly understood, in part because of the difficulty in identifying true community replicates assembled under the same environmental parameters.

Microscale ecology regulates particulate organic matter turnover in model marine microbial communities.

The degradation of particulate organic matter in the ocean is a central process in the global carbon cycle, the mode and tempo of which is determined by the bacterial communities that assemble on particle surfaces. Here, we find that the capacity of communities to degrade particles is highly dependent on community composition using a collection of marine bacteria cultured from different stages of succession on chitin microparticles. Different particle degrading taxa display characteristic particle half-lives that differ by ~170 h, comparable to the residence time of particles in the ocean's mixed layer.