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Microbial community structure and its functional implications

Nature volume 459, pages 193–199 (2009)Cite this article

Abstract

Marine microbial communities are engines of globally important processes, such as the marine carbon, nitrogen and sulphur cycles. Recent data on the structures of these communities show that they adhere to universal biological rules. Co-occurrence patterns can help define species identities, and systems-biology tools are revealing networks of interacting microorganisms. Some microbial systems are found to change predictably, helping us to anticipate how microbial communities and their activities will shift in a changing world.

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Figure 1: Rank abundance relationships for bacterial operational taxonomic units.
Figure 2: Association networks.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Å. Hagström, F. Sun, J. Steele, I. Hewson, S. Naeem, J. Green and J. Brown for helping develop ideas presented here, and C. Chow, C. Horner-Devine and J. Cram for comments. Work in my laboratory was supported by the US National Science Foundation Microbial Observatories Program and grants 0527034, 0623575, 0648581, and 0703159, and by the University of Southern California Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies.

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    Jed A. Fuhrman

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Fuhrman, J. Microbial community structure and its functional implications. Nature 459, 193–199 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature08058

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