The quest for simple rules to build a microbial community

quantamagazine.org

14 points·digital55··3 comments

"Microbial communities are key players in every ecological cycle on Earth. When a tree falls in a forest, a litany of fungi and bacteria assemble to eat and decompose it, returning the tree’s components to global nutrient cycles. With the concepts introduced by Gralka, Sanchez, Cordero and other microbial ecologists, this new community’s niches are predictable. Wood is mostly composed of cellulose and hemicellulose, which are glucose polymers; therefore, a functioning community ripe for participating in woodland decomposition would host sugar-eating bacteria, be abundant in sugar-digesting genes, and have genomes composed of a lower proportion of GC molecules."

Bacteria.

This researcher's (Matti Gralka) 'zoo' consisted of 186 Atlantic Ocean microbe species. And he found a simple rule to predict their preferences - more chemistry than DNA sequencing.

A dead tree isn't decomposed by bacteria. It's decomposed by fungi. And bacteria (and a free-for-all set of microscopic creepy crawlers) feed on that.

So: how about bacteria species from other environments? 186 species from 1 particular area is 'nothing'.

Would this simple rule hold up for bacteria species found elsewhere? Could similar rules be found to predict other metrics?

How about fungi? Or archaea? (related to bacteria but in a class of their own)

A good read, very interesting research. And... many new questions begging to be answered. Researcher's got his job cut out for him. :-)

Looks like fungi have their social networks.

I wonder to see article, about microbial social network.

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