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Interspecific diversity reduces and functionally substitutes for intraspecific variation in biofilm communities.

ABSTRACT: Diversity has a key role in the dynamics and resilience of communities and both interspecific (species) and intraspecific (genotypic) diversity can have important effects on community structure and function. However, a critical and unresolved question for understanding the ecology of a community is to what extent these two levels of diversity are functionally substitutable? Here we show, for a mixed-species biofilm community composed of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, P. protegens and Klebsiella pneumoniae, that increased interspecific diversity reduces and functionally substitutes for intraspecific diversity in mediating tolerance to stress. Biofilm populations generated high percentages of genotypic variants, which were largely absent in biofilm communities. Biofilms with either high intra- or interspecific diversity were more tolerant to SDS stress than biofilms with no or low diversity. Unexpectedly, genotypic variants decreased the tolerance of biofilm communities when experimentally introduced into the communities. For example, substituting P. protegens wild type with its genotypic variant within biofilm communities decreased SDS tolerance by twofold, apparently due to perturbation of interspecific interactions. A decrease in variant frequency was also observed when biofilm populations were exposed to cell-free effluents from another species, suggesting that extracellular factors have a role in selection against the appearance of intraspecific variants. This work demonstrates the functional substitution of inter- and intraspecific diversity for an emergent property of biofilms. It also provides a potential explanation for a long-standing paradox in microbiology, in which morphotypic variants are common in laboratory grown biofilm populations, but are rare in diverse, environmental biofilm communities.

SUBMITTER: Kelvin Lee KW

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4796923 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Interspecific diversity reduces and functionally substitutes for intraspecific variation in biofilm communities.

Kelvin Lee Kai Wei KW Hoong Yam Joey Kuok JK Mukherjee Manisha M Periasamy Saravanan S Steinberg Peter D PD Kjelleberg Staffan S Rice Scott A SA

The ISME journal 20150925 4

Diversity has a key role in the dynamics and resilience of communities and both interspecific (species) and intraspecific (genotypic) diversity can have important effects on community structure and function. However, a critical and unresolved question for understanding the ecology of a community is to what extent these two levels of diversity are functionally substitutable? Here we show, for a mixed-species biofilm community composed of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, P. protegens and Klebsiella pneumon ...[more]

PMID: 26405829

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Project description:Variation in both inter- and intraspecific traits affects community dynamics, yet we know little regarding the relative importance of external environmental filters versus internal biotic interactions that shape the functional space of communities along broad-scale environmental gradients, such as latitude, elevation, or depth. We examined changes in several key aspects of functional alpha diversity for marine fishes along depth and latitude gradients by quantifying intra- and interspecific richness, dispersion, and regularity in functional trait space. We derived eight functional traits related to food acquisition and locomotion and calculated seven complementary indices of functional diversity for 144 species of marine ray-finned fishes along large-scale depth (50-1200 m) and latitudinal gradients (29°-51° S) in New Zealand waters. Traits were derived from morphological measurements taken directly from footage obtained using Baited Remote Underwater Stereo-Video systems and museum specimens. We partitioned functional variation into intra- and interspecific components for the first time using a PERMANOVA approach. We also implemented two tree-based diversity metrics in a functional distance-based context for the first time: namely, the variance in pairwise functional distance and the variance in nearest neighbor distance. Functional alpha diversity increased with increasing depth and decreased with increasing latitude. More specifically, the dispersion and mean nearest neighbor distances among species in trait space and intraspecific trait variability all increased with depth, whereas functional hypervolume (richness) was stable across depth. In contrast, functional hypervolume, dispersion, and regularity indices all decreased with increasing latitude; however, intraspecific trait variation increased with latitude, suggesting that intraspecific trait variability becomes increasingly important at higher latitudes. These results suggest that competition within and among species are key processes shaping functional multidimensional space for fishes in the deep sea. Increasing morphological dissimilarity with increasing depth may facilitate niche partitioning to promote coexistence, whereas abiotic filtering may be the dominant process structuring communities with increasing latitude.

Project description:A better understanding of species coexistence and community dynamics may benefit from more insights on trait variability at the individual and species levels.Tadpole assemblages offer an excellent system to understand the relative influence of intraspecific and interspecific variability on community assembly, due to their high phenotypic plasticity, and the strong influence that environmental variables have on their spatial distribution and individual performance.Here, we quantified the intraspecific and interspecific components of tadpoles' trait variability in order to investigate their relative role in shaping tadpole communities.We selected eight functional traits related to microhabitat use, foraging strategies, and swimming ability. We measured these traits on 678 individuals from 22 species captured in 43 ponds in the Atlantic Forest. We used single- and multitrait analyses to decompose trait variability. To explore the action of external and internal filtering on community assembly, we used a variance decomposition approach that compares phenotypic variability at the individual, population, community and regional levels.On average, 33% of trait variability was due to within-species variation. This decomposition varied widely among traits. We found only a reduced effect of external filtering (low variation in the height of the ventral fin within ponds in comparison to the total variation), whereas the internal filtering was stronger than expected. Traits related to the use of different microhabitats through the water column were generally less variable than traits related to swimming ability to escape of predators, with tail traits being highly variable within species.Our study highlights the importance of incorporating both intraspecific and interspecific, trait differences and of focusing on a diversity of traits related to both stabilizing niche and fitness differences in order to better understand how trait variation relates to species coexistence.

Dataset Information

Interspecific diversity reduces and functionally substitutes for intraspecific variation in biofilm communities.

Publications

Interspecific diversity reduces and functionally substitutes for intraspecific variation in biofilm communities.

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