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Determinism of microbial community assembly by drastic environmental change.

ABSTRACT: Microbial community assembly is shaped by deterministic and stochastic processes, but the relationship between these processes and the environment is not understood. Here we describe a rule for the determinism and stochasticity of microbial community assembly affected by the environment using in silico, in situ, and ex situ experiments. The in silico experiment with a simple mathematical model showed that the existence of essential symbiotic microorganisms caused stochastic microbial community assembly, unless the community was exposed to a non-adapted nutritional concentration. Then, a deterministic assembly occurred due to the low number of microorganisms adapted to the environment. In the in situ experiment in the middle of a river, the microbial community composition was relatively deterministic after the drastic environmental change caused by the treated wastewater contamination, as analyzed by 16S rRNA gene sequencing. Furthermore, by culturing microbial communities collected from the upstream natural area and downstream urban area of the river in test tubes with varying carbon source concentrations, the upstream community assembly became deterministic with high carbon concentrations while the downstream community assembly became deterministic with low carbon concentrations. These results suggest that large environmental changes, which are different from the original environment, result in a deterministic microbial community assembly.

SUBMITTER: Nishida A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8638896 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are host to diverse microbial communities and receive a constant influx of microbes from influent wastewater. However, the impact of immigrants on the structure and activities of the activated sludge (AS) microbial community remains unclear. To gain insight on this phenomenon known as perpetual community coalescence, the current study utilized controlled manipulative experiments that decoupled the influent wastewater composition from the microbial populations to reveal the fundamental mechanisms involved in immigration between sewers and AS-WWTP. The immigration dynamics of heterotrophs were analyzed by harvesting wastewater biomass solids from three different sewer systems and adding to synthetic wastewater. Immigrating influent populations were observed to contribute up to 14% of the sequencing reads in the AS. By modeling the net growth rate of taxa, it was revealed that immigrants primarily exhibited low or negative net growth rates. By developing a protocol to reproducibly grow AS-WWTP communities in the lab, we have laid down the foundational principles for the testing of operational factors creating community variations with low noise and appropriate replication. Understanding the processes that drive microbial community diversity and assembly is a key question in microbial ecology. In the future, this knowledge can be used to manipulate the structure of microbial communities and improve system performance in WWTPs.IMPORTANCEIn biological wastewater treatment processes, the microbial community composition is essential in the performance and stability of the system. This study developed a reproducible protocol to investigate the impact of influent immigration (or perpetual coalescence of the sewer and activated sludge communities) with appropriate reproducibility and controls, allowing intrinsic definitions of core and immigrant populations to be established. The method developed herein will allow sequential manipulative experiments to be performed to test specific hypothesis and optimize wastewater treatment processes to meet new treatment goals.

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Determinism of microbial community assembly by drastic environmental change.

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