ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Historical contingencies and phage induction diversify bacterioplankton communities at the microscale.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 31 citations in OpenAlex.
- Synergistic degradation of fucoidans in the ocean.Nature · 2026Article
- Article
- Eco-evolutionary dynamics of massive, parallel bacteriophage outbreaks in compost communities.Science advances · 2026Article
- Navigating complexity: key considerations for studying fungal-bacterial interactions.mSystems · 2026Article
- Stochastic Forces in Microbial Community Assembly: Founding Community Size Governs Divergent Ecological Trajectories.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Hypersensitivity of chitin degradation to initial species densities due to monomer diffusion.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- A microbiologist's field guide to community ecology.ISME communications · 2026Review
- Phage diversity mirrors bacterial strain diversity in the honey bee gut microbiota.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Degradation of extracellular polymeric substances shapes microbial community diversity.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Vitamin auxotrophies shape microbial community assembly on model marine particles.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Polysaccharide quantification using microbial enzyme cocktails.Biology methods & protocols · 2025Article
- Inferring strain-level mutational drivers of phage-bacteria interaction phenotypes arising during coevolutionary dynamics.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Phage predation accelerates the spread of plasmid-encoded antibiotic resistance.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Inferring strain-level mutational drivers of phage-bacteria interaction phenotypes arising during coevolutionary dynamics.Virus evolution · 2024Article
- Searching for Principles of Microbial Ecology Across Levels of Biological Organization.Integrative and comparative biology · 2023Article
- Environmental fluctuations explain the universal decay of species-abundance correlations with phylogenetic distance.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Identifying and tracking mobile elements in evolving compost communities yields insights into the nanobiome.ISME communications · 2023Article
- Annotation-free discovery of functional groups in microbial communities.Nature ecology & evolution · 2023Article
- Formation and emergent dynamics of spatially organized microbial systems.Interface focus · 2023Review
- Historical contingencies and phage induction diversify bacterioplankton communities at the microscale.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In many natural environments, microorganisms decompose microscale resource patches made of complex organic matter. The growth and collapse of populations on these resource patches unfold within spatial ranges of a few hundred micrometers or less, making such microscale ecosystems hotspots of heterotrophic metabolism. Despite the potential importance of patch-level dynamics for the large-scale functioning of heterotrophic microbial communities, we have not yet been able to delineate the ecological processes that control natural populations at the microscale. Here, we address this challenge by characterizing the natural marine communities that assembled on over 1,000 individual microscale particles of chitin, the most abundant marine polysaccharide. Using low-template shotgun metagenomics and imaging, we find significant variation in microscale community composition despite the similarity in initial species pools across replicates. Chitin-degrading taxa that were rare in seawater established large populations on a subset of particles, resulting in a wide range of predicted chitinolytic abilities and biomass at the level of individual particles. We show, through a mathematical model, that this variability can be attributed to stochastic colonization and historical contingencies affecting the tempo of growth on particles. We find evidence that one biological process leading to such noisy growth across particles is differential predation by temperate bacteriophages of chitin-degrading strains, the keystone members of the community. Thus, initial stochasticity in assembly states on individual particles, amplified through ecological interactions, may have significant consequences for the diversity and functionality of systems of microscale patches.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.