A central pursuit of microbial ecology is to accurately describe and explain the shifts in microbial community composition and function that occur in response to environmental changes. This goal requires a thorough understanding of the individual responses of different species and of the processes guiding the assembly of microbial populations similar in their response traits and corresponding functional traits. These research topics are addressed and synthesized in this Highlights, in four studies applying a trait-based framework to assess how environmental change affected the composition and functional performance of bacterioplankton of natural origin in microcosm experiments. The salinity of many aquatic environments is currently changing, due to climate change and anthropogenic activities. The mechanisms by which salinity influences community assembly, functional redundancy and functional genes involved in nitrogen cycle, and how dispersal modifies community outcome are explored in the four studies. Together, the findings of these case studies demonstrate the feasibility of using novel experiments in combination with integrative analyses of 16S rRNA and meta-‘omic’ data to address ecological questions. This combined approach has the potential to elucidate both the processes contributing to bacterial community assembly and the possible links between the compositional and functional changes that occur under shifting environmental conditions.

中文翻译：

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通过微观世界了解微生物群落对盐水入侵的反应


微生物生态学的一个中心任务是准确描述和解释微生物群落组成和功能因环境变化而发生的变化。这一目标需要彻底了解不同物种的个体反应，以及指导具有相似反应特征和相应功能特征的微生物群体组装的过程。这些研究主题在本摘要中得到了阐述和综合，四项研究应用基于性状的框架来评估环境变化如何影响微观实验中天然来源的浮游细菌的组成和功能表现。由于气候变化和人类活动，许多水生环境的盐度目前正在发生变化。这四项研究探讨了盐度影响群落组装、功能冗余和参与氮循环的功能基因的机制，以及扩散如何改变群落结果。总之，这些案例研究的结果证明了使用新颖的实验结合 16S rRNA 和元“组学”数据的综合分析来解决生态问题的可行性。这种组合方法有可能阐明有助于细菌群落组装的过程以及在不断变化的环境条件下发生的组成和功能变化之间可能的联系。