Journal
ISME JOURNAL
Volume 11, Issue 4, Pages 920-931Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/ismej.2016.175
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- ERC [242635]
- German Federal State North Rhine-Westphalia
- Max Planck Society
- Campus Alberta Innovation Chair
- NSERC
- European Research Council [StG 306933]
- European Research Council (ERC) [242635] Funding Source: European Research Council (ERC)
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Succession of redox processes is sometimes assumed to define a basic microbial community structure for ecosystems with oxygen gradients. In this paradigm, aerobic respiration, denitrification, fermentation and sulfate reduction proceed in a thermodynamically determined order, known as the ` redox tower'. Here, we investigated whether redox sorting of microbial processes explains microbial community structure at low-oxygen concentrations. We subjected a diverse microbial community sampled from a coastal marine sediment to 100 days of tidal cycling in a laboratory chemostat. Oxygen gradients (both in space and time) led to the assembly of a microbial community dominated by populations that each performed aerobic and anaerobic metabolism in parallel. This was shown by metagenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and stable isotope incubations. Effective oxygen consumption combined with the formation of microaggregates sustained the activity of oxygensensitive anaerobic enzymes, leading to braiding of unsorted redox processes, within and between populations. Analyses of available metagenomic data sets indicated that the same ecological strategies might also be successful in some natural ecosystems.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available