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Volume 170, Issue 9

Characterizing a stable five-species microbial community for use in experimental evolution and ecology Open Access

Abstract

Model microbial communities are regularly used to test ecological and evolutionary theory as they are easy to manipulate and have fast generation times, allowing for large-scale, high-throughput experiments. A key assumption for most model microbial communities is that they stably coexist, but this is rarely tested experimentally. Here we report the (dis)assembly of a five-species microbial community from a metacommunity of soil microbes that can be used for future experiments. Using reciprocal invasion-from-rare experiments we show that all species can coexist and we demonstrate that the community is stable for a long time (~600 generations). Crucially for future work, we show that each species can be identified by their plate morphologies, even after >1 year in co-culture. We characterise pairwise species interactions and produce high-quality reference genomes for each species. This stable five-species community can be used to test key questions in microbial ecology and evolution.

  • Received:
  • Accepted:
  • Published Online:
Keyword(s): stability , coexistence , microbial community and model community
Funding
This study was supported by the:
  • Natural Environment Research Council (Award NE/V012347/1, NE/S000771/1)
    • Principle Award Recipient: BucklingAngus
© 2024 The Authors
  • This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. This article was made open access via a Publish and Read agreement between the Microbiology Society and the corresponding author’s institution.
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2024-09-19
2024-10-14
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/content/journal/micro/10.1099/mic.0.001489
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Characterizing a stable five-species microbial community for use in experimental evolution and ecology
Microbiology 170, 001489 (2024); https://doi.org/10.1099/mic.0.001489
/content/journal/micro/10.1099/mic.0.001489
/content/journal/micro/10.1099/mic.0.001489
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