Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
© The Author(s), 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Ferrer-González, F. X., Widner, B., Holderman, N. R., Glushka, J., Edison, A. S., Kujawinski, E. B., & Moran, M. A. Resource partitioning of phytoplankton metabolites that support bacterial heterotrophy. ISME Journal, (2020), doi:10.1038/s41396-020-00811-y.
Description:
The communities of bacteria that assemble around marine microphytoplankton are predictably dominated by Rhodobacterales, Flavobacteriales, and families within the Gammaproteobacteria. Yet whether this consistent ecological pattern reflects the result of resource-based niche partitioning or resource competition requires better knowledge of the metabolites linking microbial autotrophs and heterotrophs in the surface ocean. We characterized molecules targeted for uptake by three heterotrophic bacteria individually co-cultured with a marine diatom using two strategies that vetted the exometabolite pool for biological relevance by means of bacterial activity assays: expression of diagnostic genes and net drawdown of exometabolites, the latter detected with mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance using novel sample preparation approaches. Of the more than 36 organic molecules with evidence of bacterial uptake, 53% contained nitrogen (including nucleosides and amino acids), 11% were organic sulfur compounds (including dihydroxypropanesulfonate and dimethysulfoniopropionate), and 28% were components of polysaccharides (including chrysolaminarin, chitin, and alginate). Overlap in phytoplankton-derived metabolite use by bacteria in the absence of competition was low, and only guanosine, proline, and N-acetyl-d-glucosamine were predicted to be used by all three. Exometabolite uptake pattern points to a key role for ecological resource partitioning in the assembly marine bacterial communities transforming recent photosynthate.
Description:
This work was supported by grants from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (5503) and the National Science Foundation (IOS-1656311) to MAM, ASE, and EBK, and by the Simons Foundation grant 542391 to MAM within the Principles of Microbial Ecosystems (PriME) Collaborative.
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
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