1. Microbial functional trait of rRNA operon copy numbers increases with organic levels in anaerobic digesters
- Author
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Wu, Linwei, Yang, Yunfeng, Chen, Si, Jason Shi, Zhou, Zhao, Mengxin, Zhu, Zhenwei, Yang, Sihang, Qu, Yuanyuan, Ma, Qiao, He, Zhili, Zhou, Jizhong, and He, Qiang
- Abstract
The ecological concept of the r-K life history strategy is widely applied in macro-ecology to characterize functional traits of taxa. However, its adoption in microbial communities is limited, owing to the lack of a measureable, convenient functional trait for classification. In this study, we performed an experiment of stepwise organic amendments in triplicate anaerobic digesters. We found that high resource availability significantly favored microbial r-strategists such as Bacillusspp. Incremental resource availability heightened average rRNA operon copy number of microbial community, resulting in a strong, positive correlation (r>0.74, P<0.008). This study quantifies how resource availability manipulations influence microbial community composition and supports the idea that rRNA operon copy number is an ecologically meaningful trait which reflects resource availability.
- Published
- 2017
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