Microbial Community Composition Predicts Bacterial Production Across Ocean Ecosystems

Overview

Journal ISME J

Publisher Oxford University Press

Specialties Environmental Health
Microbiology

Date 2024 Aug 6

PMID 39105280

Authors

Elizabeth Connors

Avishek Dutta

Rebecca Trinh

Natalia Erazo

Srishti Dasarathy

Hugh Ducklow

J L Weissman

Yi-Chun Yeh

Oscar Schofield

Deborah Steinberg

Jed Fuhrman

Jeff S Bowman

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Microbial ecological functions are an emergent property of community composition. For some ecological functions, this link is strong enough that community composition can be used to estimate the quantity of an ecological function. Here, we apply random forest regression models to compare the predictive performance of community composition and environmental data for bacterial production (BP). Using data from two independent long-term ecological research sites-Palmer LTER in Antarctica and Station SPOT in California-we found that community composition was a strong predictor of BP. The top performing model achieved an R2 of 0.84 and RMSE of 20.2 pmol L-1 hr-1 on independent validation data, outperforming a model based solely on environmental data (R2 = 0.32, RMSE = 51.4 pmol L-1 hr-1). We then operationalized our top performing model, estimating BP for 346 Antarctic samples from 2015 to 2020 for which only community composition data were available. Our predictions resolved spatial trends in BP with significance in the Antarctic (P value = 1 × 10-4) and highlighted important taxa for BP across ocean basins. Our results demonstrate a strong link between microbial community composition and microbial ecosystem function and begin to leverage long-term datasets to construct models of BP based on microbial community composition.

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