Closely related microbes share community preferences across phyla and environments
A global analysis of more than 1.15 million microbiome samples shows that closely related microbial taxa tend to occur in similar ecological communities, a pattern the authors call community conservatism that is detectable across environments and deep evolutionary time.
- Analysis used 1.15 million samples and about 183,000 OTUs from the MicrobeAtlas database to compare pairwise phylogenetic relatedness and community similarity.
- Closely related OTU pairs are found in more similar communities worldwide, supporting the concept of community conservatism.
- The pattern appears across all tested phyla and nearly all taxonomic ranks, with the biggest shift in community similarity occurring between species and genus levels.
- Community conservatism holds within individual environments and is especially pronounced in soils, although broad habitat preference explains part of the signal.
- Authors suggest community conservatism can be used alongside sequence similarity to improve OTU delimitation and to study microbial evolution and community assembly