Microbial Communities

Question 1

What are characteristics of a community?

Answer 1

1. Abundance
2. Activity (dormant/active)
3. Function
4. Occupancy (specialist/generalist)

Question 2

Within communities there are…

Answer 2

different subcommunities

Question 3

How are subcommunities formed?

Answer 3

Niche Theory: a deterministic process involving the abiotic environment and biotic interactions
Neutral Theory: a stochastic process involving dispersal and drift

Question 4

What do Niche Theory and Neutral Theory determine?

Answer 4

Community assembly: the distribution pattern of organisms in a community

Question 5

What is community robustness?

Answer 5

emergent properties that make the community identifiable

Question 6

what are some examples of properties of community robustness?

Answer 6

• clade and guild analysis
• redundancy
• disturbance response
• phenotypic plasticity

Question 7

Define “regime” in the community stability context

Answer 7

A regime refers to the dominant phylotype/functional group at a given time and condition

Question 8

The effects of disturbance are related to the current regime’s…

Answer 8

resistance and resilience to ecological change

Question 9

What are the key elements of microbial communities?

Answer 9

1. Functional pathways of nutrients and energy
2. Mechanistic interactions between microbial populations, their environments, and other organisms
3. Existential emergent properties of the community like system stability and diversity
4. Degrees of functional redundancy