Microbial communities are considered to be functionally redundant, but few studies have tested this hypothesis empirically. In this study, we performed an in situ reciprocal transplant experiment on the surface and bottom waters of two lakes with disparate trophic states and tracked changes in their microbial community and functional attributes for 6 weeks using high-throughput sequencing and functional approaches. The communities from both lakes were resistant to changes in composition after the reciprocal transplant, but their functions tended to become similar to the incubating lakes functional profiles. A significant linear positive relationship was observed between the microbial community and functional attributes, though with varying scales of similarity, suggesting partial functional redundancy. Furthermore, the entropy-based L-divergence measure quantified the scale of partial functional redundancy in the lakes surface and bottom waters. This study establishes and quantifies the scale of partial functional redundancy in the freshwater ecosystem through empirical investigation.

中文翻译：

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水生微生物群落在功能上是部分多余的：来自原位互惠移植实验的见解

微生物群落被认为在功能上是多余的，但是很少有研究从经验上检验这一假设。在这项研究中，我们进行了原位在两个营养状态不同的湖泊的表面和底部进行相互移植实验，并使用高通量测序和功能方法连续6周追踪了其微生物群落和功能属性的变化。双向移植后，两个湖泊的群落对组成的变化均具有抵抗力，但它们的功能趋于变得与孵化的湖泊功能相似。微生物群落和功能属性之间存在显着的线性正相关关系，尽管相似程度不同，表明存在部分功能冗余。此外，基于熵的L差异度量量化了湖泊表层和底水部分功能冗余的规模。本研究通过实证研究建立并量化了淡水生态系统中部分功能冗余的规模。