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- Graham, Emily B., et al.
(författare)
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Microbes as Engines of Ecosystem Function : When Does Community Structure Enhance Predictions of Ecosystem Processes?
- 2016
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Ingår i: Frontiers in Microbiology. - : Frontiers Media SA. - 1664-302X. ; 7
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Microorganisms are vital in mediating the earth's biogeochemical cycles; yet, despite our rapidly increasing ability to explore complex environmental microbial communities, the relationship between microbial community structure and ecosystem processes remains poorly understood. Here, we address a fundamental and unanswered question in microbial ecology: 'When do we need to understand microbial community structure to accurately predict function?' We present a statistical analysis investigating the value of environmental data and microbial community structure independently and in combination for explaining rates of carbon and nitrogen cycling processes within 82 global datasets. Environmental variables were the strongest predictors of process rates but left 44% of variation unexplained on average, suggesting the potential for microbial data to increase model accuracy. Although only 29% of our datasets were significantly improved by adding information on microbial community structure, we observed improvement in models of processes mediated by narrow phylogenetic guilds via functional gene data, and conversely, improvement in models of facultative microbial processes via community diversity metrics. Our results also suggest that microbial diversity can strengthen predictions of respiration rates beyond microbial biomass parameters, as 53% of models were improved by incorporating both sets of predictors compared to 35% by microbial biomass alone. Our analysis represents the first comprehensive analysis of research examining links between microbial community structure and ecosystem function. Taken together, our results indicate that a greater understanding of microbial communities informed by ecological principles may enhance our ability to predict ecosystem process rates relative to assessments based on environmental variables and microbial physiology.
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| 2. |
- Uribe-Convers, S., et al.
(författare)
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Phylogenetic relationships of Burmeistera (Campanulaceae: Lobelioideae): Combining whole plastome with targeted loci data in a recent radiation
- 2017
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Ingår i: Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. - : Elsevier BV. - 1055-7903. ; 107, s. 551-563
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The field of molecular systematics has benefited greatly with the advent of high-throughput sequencing (HTS), making large genomic datasets commonplace. However, a large number of targeted Sanger sequences produced by many studies over the last two decades are publicly available and should not be overlooked. In this study, we elucidate the phylogenetic relationships of the plant genus Burmeistera (Campanulaceae: Lobelioideae), while investigating how to best combine targeted Sanger loci with FITS data. We sequence, annotate, and analyze complete to nearly complete plastomes for a subset of the genus. We then combine these data with a much larger taxonomic dataset for which only Sanger sequences are available, making this the most comprehensively sampled study in the genus to date. We show that using a phylogeny inferred from the species with plastome data as a topological constraint for the larger dataset increases the resolution of our data and produces a more robust evolutionary hypothesis for the group. We then use the resulting phylogeny to study the evolution of morphological traits thought to be important in Burmeistera, and assess their usefulness in the current taxonomic classification of the genus. The main morphological character used to delimit subgeneric sections, the presence or absence of hairs on the apex of the two ventral anthers, shows a complex evolutionary history with many changes in the tree, suggesting that this character should not be used for taxonomic classification. Although it is too soon to propose a new subgeneric classification for Burmeistera, our results highlight some morphological traits shared by whole clades that could potentially be used in future taxonomic work. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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