Stoichiometric imbalances between terrestrial decomposer communities and their resources: mechanisms and implications of microbial adaptations to their resources

By M. Mooshammer, W. Wanek, S. Zechmeister-Boltenstern, Andreas Richter. Frontiers in Microbiology, 2014

821 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Terrestrial microbial decomposer communities thrive on a wide range of organic matter types that rarely ever meet their elemental demands. In this review we synthesize the current state-of-the-art of microbial adaptations to resource stoichiometry, in order to gain a deeper understanding of the interactions between heterotrophic microbial communities and their chemical environment. The stoichiometric imbalance between microbial communities and their organic substrates generally decreases from wood to leaf litter and further to topsoil and subsoil organic matter. Microbial communities can respond to these imbalances in four ways: first, they adapt their biomass composition toward their resource in a non-homeostatic behavior. Such changes are, however, only moderate, and occur mainly because of changes in microbial community structure and less so due to cellular storage of elements in excess. Second, microbial communities can mobilize resources that meet their elemental demand by producing specific extracellular enzymes, which, in turn, is restricted by the C and N requirement for enzyme production itself. Third, microbes can regulate their element use efficiencies (ratio of element invested in growth over total element uptake), such that they release elements in excess depending on their demand (e.g., respiration and N mineralization). Fourth, diazotrophic bacteria and saprotrophic fungi may trigger the input of external N and P to decomposer communities. Theoretical considerations show that adjustments in element use efficiencies may be the most important mechanism by which microbes regulate their biomass stoichiometry. This review summarizes different views on how microbes cope with imbalanced supply of C, N and P, thereby providing a framework for integrating and linking microbial adaptation to resource imbalances to ecosystem scale fluxes across scales and ecosystems.

Subfields: Ecology, Insect Science, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6199666627954724415c8bd0d5b38eb684d8f11b

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Citations in the corpus

Microbial carbon use efficiency: accounting for population, community, and ecosystem-scale controls over the fate of metabolized organic matter (2016, background): “…and Schmidt 2015), the environmental sensitivity of microbial physiology (Apple et al. 2006; Schipper et al. 2014), consumersubstrate stoichiometric balance (Creamer et al. 2014; Mooshammer et al. 2014), and microbial community structure and activity (Six et al. 2006; Blagodatskaya et al. 2014).”
Plant diversity predicts beta but not alpha diversity of soil microbes across grasslands worldwide. (2015, background): “The potential importance of C : N is consistent with links between the stoichiometry of plant litter and of soil microbial biomass; and with the contribution of shifts in microbial composition to the stoichiometric plasticity of microbial communities (Mooshammer et al. 2014).”
Stoichiometric responses of soil microflora to nutrient additions for two temperate forest soils (2017, background): “The reduction of microbial C/N in response to N additions suggests that soil microflora adjusts their biomass stoichiometry in a nonhomeostatic behavior (i.e., leading to a convergence between the microbial and resource stoichiometry; Mooshammer et al. 2014) to adapt to changes in resource stoichiom”
Patterns and mechanisms of responses by soil microbial communities to nitrogen addition (2017, background): “Microbial community composition is also sensitive to variations in soil N availability and soil pH (Six et al., 2006; H€ ogberg et al., 2007; Rousk et al., 2010; Fanin et al., 2013; Waring et al., 2013; Mooshammer et al., 2014; Zechmeister-Boltenstern et al., 2015; Zhou and Wang, 2015).”
Response of microbial diversity to C:N:P stoichiometry in fine root and microbial biomass following afforestation (2017, background): “:P homeostasis to changing environments (Mooshammer et al. 2012, 2014; Ren et al. 2016a, b; Deng et al. 2016).”
Trends in soil microbial communities during secondary succession (2017, background): “…remarkably influence microbial biomass, stoichiometry, community compositions, extracellular enzyme production, and activity (Xu et al., 2014, 2017; Mooshammer et al., 2014; Zechmeister-Boltenstern et al., 2015; Zhou and Wang, 2015; Zhou et al., 2017), but little is known about their coordinating…”