Large-sized planktonic bioaggregates possess high biofilm formation potentials: Bacterial succession and assembly in the biofilm metacommunity

Wanted and unwanted surface-attached growth of bacteria is ubiquitous in natural and engineered settings. Normally, attachment of planktonic cells to media surfaces initiates biofilm formation and fundamentally regulates biofilm assembly processes. Here, culturing biofilm with planktonic sludge as source community, we found distinct succession profiles of biofilm communities sourced from the size-fractionated sludge flocs ( 120 μm). Null model analyses revealed that deterministic process dominated in biofilm community assemblies but decreased with decreasing floc size. Additionally, the relative importance of environmental selection increased with increasing floc size of the source sludge, whereas homogenizing dispersal and ecological drift followed opposite trends. Phylogenetic molecular ecological networks (pMENs) indicated that species interactions were intensive in biofilm microbiota developed from large-sized flocs (>120 μm), as evidenced by the low modularity and harmonic geodesic distance and the high average degree. Intriguingly, the keystone taxa in these biofilm ecological networks were controlled by distinct interaction patterns but all showed strong habitat characteristics (e.g., facultative anaerobic, motile, hydrophobic and involved in extracellular polymeric substance metabolism), corroborating the crucial roles of environmental filtering in structuring biofilm community. Taken together, our findings highlight the role of planktonic floc properties in biofilm community assembly and advance our understanding of microbial ecology in biofilm-based systems.