ArticleCommunications biology2020
A multi-scale eco-evolutionary model of cooperation reveals how microbial adaptation influences soil decomposition.
Article in Communications biology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Spatial structure: shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2026Review
- Microbiome Adaptation Could Amplify Modeled Projections of Global Soil Carbon Loss With Climate Warming.Global change biology · 2025Article
- Soil temperature, microbial biomass and enzyme activity are the critical factors affecting soil respiration in different soil layers in Ziwuling Mountains, China.Frontiers in microbiology · 2023Article
- Ecological modelling approaches for predicting emergent properties in microbial communities.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Review
- The Ecology Underground coalition: building a collaborative future of belowground ecology and ecologists.The New phytologist · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The decomposition of soil organic matter (SOM) is a critical process in global terrestrial ecosystems. SOM decomposition is driven by micro-organisms that cooperate by secreting costly extracellular (exo-)enzymes. This raises a fundamental puzzle: the stability of microbial decomposition in spite of its evolutionary vulnerability to "cheaters"-mutant strains that reap the benefits of cooperation while paying a lower cost. Resolving this puzzle requires a multi-scale eco-evolutionary model that captures the spatio-temporal dynamics of molecule-molecule, molecule-cell, and cell-cell interactions. The analysis of such a model reveals local extinctions, microbial dispersal, and limited soil diffusivity as key factors of the evolutionary stability of microbial decomposition. At the scale of whole-ecosystem function, soil diffusivity influences the evolution of exo-enzyme production, which feeds back to the average SOM decomposition rate and stock. Microbial adaptive evolution may thus be an important factor in the response of soil carbon fluxes to global environmental change.
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