Revisiting life strategy concepts in environmental microbial ecology.

By A. Ho, D. Lonardo, P. Bodelier. FEMS Microbiology Ecology, 2017

738 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Microorganisms are physiologically diverse, possessing disparate genomic features and mechanisms for adaptation (functional traits), which reflect on their associated life strategies and determine at least to some extent their prevalence and distribution in the environment. Unlike animals and plants, there is an unprecedented diversity and intractable metabolic versatility among bacteria, making classification or grouping these microorganisms based on their functional traits as has been done in animal and plant ecology challenging. Nevertheless, based on representative pure cultures, microbial traits distinguishing different life strategies had been proposed, and had been the focus of previous reviews. In the environment, however, the vast majority of naturally occurring microorganisms have yet to be isolated, restricting the association of life strategies to broad phylogenetic groups and/or physiological characteristics. Here, we reviewed the literature to determine how microbial life strategy concepts (i.e. copio- and oligotrophic strategists, and competitor-stress tolerator-ruderals framework) are applied in complex microbial communities. Because of the scarcity of direct empirical evidence elucidating the associated life strategies in complex communities, we rely heavily on observational studies determining the response of microorganisms to (a)biotic cues (e.g. resource availability) to infer microbial life strategies. Although our focus is on the life strategies of bacteria, parallels were drawn from the fungal community. Our literature search showed inconsistency in the community response of proposed copiotrophic- and oligotrophic-associated microorganisms (phyla level) to changing environmental conditions. This suggests that tracking microorganisms at finer phylogenetic and taxonomic resolution (e.g. family level or lower) may be more effective to capture changes in community response and/or that edaphic factors exert a stronger effect in community response. We discuss the limitations and provide recommendations for future research applying microbial life strategies in environmental studies.

Subfields: Ecology, Molecular Biology, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4aedf30a4db042810bb4818bbb2a6c469cc8f0dc

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology

1. B. Frey
2. P. Niklaus
3. J. Rousk
4. Catherine Larose
5. Johanna Donhauser
6. E. Bååth
7. Y. Kuzyakov

In Molecular Biology

1. B. Frey
2. P. Niklaus
3. J. Rousk
4. Catherine Larose
5. Johanna Donhauser

In Plant Science

1. J. Mukherjee
2. Shantanu Bhunia
3. Avradeep Bhowmik
4. J. Rousk
5. R. Mallick

Citations in the corpus

• Temperatures beyond the community optimum promote the dominance of heat-adapted, fast growing and stress resistant bacteria in alpine soils (2020, background): “Accordingly, mesophils to moderate thermophils such as Alicyclobacillus and Acidibacillus (both Firmicutes; Goto et al., 2007; Holanda et al., 2016) increased at 35 �C.”
• Agronomic Efficiency of Animal-Derived Organic Fertilizers and Their Effects on Biology and Fertility of Soil: A Review (2021, background): “Compared to bacteria, fungus poses more oligotrophic features as they prefer nutrient-rich environment to grow, therefore, the species of fungal phylum Basidiomycota including Irpex, Pycnoporus, Trametes, Schizophyllum and Fomes predominantly show oligotrophy in organic soils [186].”
• Microbiome definition re-visited: old concepts and new challenges (2020, neutral): “can influence outcomes of interactions [63].”