THE GENERATION AND MAINTENANCE OF DIVERSITY IN MICROBIAL COMMUNITIES
THE GENERATION AND MAINTENANCE OF DIVERSITY IN MICROBIAL COMMUNITIES
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DOI：
10.3732/ajb.1000498
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发表时间：
2011-03-01
影响因子：
3
通讯作者：
Lennon, Jay T.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Fierer, Noah;Lennon, Jay T.
微生物在调节生态系统过程中发挥着核心作用，它们构成了地球上绝大多数物种。随着分子方法的最新发展，量化自然环境中微生物多样性的程度已经变得容易。在这里，我们考察了我们对微生物多样性理解的这场革命，并探索了导致在单个环境样本中发现的微生物分类群数量似乎令人震惊的因素。我们对来自各种生态系统的细菌丰富度估计进行了荟萃分析。几乎所有的环境都包含成百上千的细菌分类群，丰富度水平随着样本中个体数量的增加而增加，这一模式与报道的非微生物分类群一致。粗略的比较可能会发现，细菌的丰富度远远超过了动植物分类群通常观察到的丰富度水平。然而，细菌群落的表观多样性受到系统发育广度和异速生长比例问题的影响。当考虑到这些特征时，微生物多样性的水平可能就不那么令人惊讶了。尽管生态学和生物地理学传统上忽视了微生物，但在生物多样性调查中忽视微生物已不再是正当的借口。一旦我们将我们的分析规模与被观察到的有机体的规模相协调，许多为解释植物和动物多样性模式而开发的概念也可以应用于微生物。此外，来自微生物系统的知识可能提供对非微生物系统中产生和维持物种丰富度的机制的洞察。
Microorganisms play a central role in the regulation of ecosystem processes, and they comprise the vast majority of species on Earth. With recent developments in molecular methods, it has become tractable to quantify the extent of microbial diversity in natural environments. Here we examine this revolution in our understanding of microbial diversity, and we explore the factors that contribute to the seemingly astounding numbers of microbial taxa found within individual environmental samples. We conducted a meta-analysis of bacterial richness estimates from a variety of ecosystems. Nearly all environments contained hundreds to thousands of bacterial taxa, and richness levels increased with the number of individuals in a sample, a pattern consistent with those reported for nonmicrobial taxa. A cursory comparison might suggest that bacterial richness far exceeds the richness levels typically observed for plant and animal taxa. However, the apparent diversity of bacterial communities is influenced by phylogenetic breadth and allometric scaling issues. When these features are taken into consideration, the levels of microbial diversity may appear less astounding. Although the fields of ecology and biogeography have traditionally ignored microorganisms, there are no longer valid excuses for neglecting microorganisms in surveys of biodiversity. Many of the concepts developed to explain plant and animal diversity patterns can also be applied to microorganisms once we reconcile the scale of our analyses to the scale of the organisms being observed. Furthermore, knowledge from microbial systems may provide insight into the mechanisms that generate and maintain species richness in nonmicrobial systems.