Stochastic processes shape microeukaryotic community assembly in a subtropical river across wet and dry seasons

By Weidong Chen, Kexin Ren, A. Isabwe, Huihuang Chen, Min Liu, Jun Yang. Microbiome, 2019

725 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The deep mechanisms (deterministic and/or stochastic processes) underlying community assembly are a central challenge in microbial ecology. However, the relative importance of these processes in shaping riverine microeukaryotic biogeography is still poorly understood. Here, we compared the spatiotemporal and biogeographical patterns of microeukaryotic community using high-throughput sequencing of 18S rRNA gene and multivariate statistical analyses from a subtropical river during wet and dry seasons. Our results provide the first description of biogeographical patterns of microeukaryotic communities in the Tingjiang River, the largest river in the west of Fujian province, southeastern China. The results showed that microeukaryotes from both wet and dry seasons exhibited contrasting community compositions, which might be owing to planktonic microeukaryotes having seasonal succession patterns. Further, all components of the microeukaryotic communities (including total, dominant, always rare, and conditionally rare taxa) exhibited a significant distance-decay pattern in both seasons, and these communities had a stronger distance-decay relationship during the dry season, especially for the conditionally rare taxa. Although several variables had a significant influence on the microeukaryotic communities, the environmental and spatial factors showed minor roles in shaping the communities. Importantly, these microeukaryotic communities were strongly driven by stochastic processes, with 89.9%, 88.5%, and 89.6% of the community variation explained by neutral community model during wet, dry, and both seasons, respectively. The neutral community model also explained a large fraction of the community variation across different taxonomic groups and levels. Additionally, the microeukaryotic taxa, which were above and below the neutral prediction, were ecologically and taxonomically distinct groups, which might be interactively structured by deterministic and stochastic processes. This study demonstrated that stochastic processes are sufficient in shaping substantial variation in river microeukaryotic metacommunity across different hydrographic regimes, thereby providing a better understanding of spatiotemporal patterns, processes, and mechanisms of microeukaryotic community in waters.

Subfields: Ecology, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2070f953225729ff3845ca758f89a3a91085fc19

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In Ecology

1. Ji‐Zheng He
2. Hangwei Hu
3. B. A. Nguyen
4. Chaoyu Li
5. Zhen-Zhen Yan
6. Yong Zheng
7. Qing‐Lin Chen
8. Yong-guan Zhu

In Molecular Biology

1. Ji‐Zheng He
2. Hangwei Hu
3. B. A. Nguyen
4. Chaoyu Li
5. Zhen-Zhen Yan
6. Yong Zheng
7. Qing‐Lin Chen
8. Yong-guan Zhu

Citations in the corpus

• Deterministic selection dominates microbial community assembly in termite mounds (2020, background): “After a long-standing debate, however, deterministic and stochastic processes are now known to be not mutually exclusive, but rather act concurrently to regulate the community assembly [5, 10, 11].”