Publication Date:
2009-08-15
Description:
Microbes are incredibly abundant and diverse and are key to ecosystem functioning, yet relatively little is known about the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that shape their distributions. Bacteriophages, viral parasites that lyse their bacterial hosts, exert intense and spatially varying selection pressures on bacteria and vice versa. We measured local adaptation of bacteria and their associated phages in a centimeter-scale soil population. We first demonstrate that a large proportion of bacteria is sensitive to locally occurring phages. We then show that sympatric phages (isolated from the same 2-gram soil samples as the bacteria) are more infective than are phages from samples some distance away. This study demonstrates the importance of biotic interactions for the small-scale spatial structuring of microbial genetic diversity in soil.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Vos, Michiel -- Birkett, Philip J -- Birch, Elizabeth -- Griffiths, Robert I -- Buckling, Angus -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2009 Aug 14;325(5942):833. doi: 10.1126/science.1174173.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3PS, UK. michiel.vos@nioo.knaw.nl〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19679806" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
*Adaptation, Physiological
;
Bacteria/genetics/*virology
;
Bacterial Physiological Phenomena
;
Bacteriophages/genetics/*physiology
;
Biological Evolution
;
Ecosystem
;
Genetic Variation
;
Molecular Sequence Data
;
Selection, Genetic
;
*Soil Microbiology
;
Stenotrophomonas/genetics/physiology/*virology
;
Viral Plaque Assay
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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