Microbial functional trait of rRNA operon copy numbers increases with organic levels in anaerobic digesters

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Abstract

The ecological concept of the r-K life history strategy is widely applied in macro-ecology to characterize functional traits of taxa. However, its adoption in microbial communities is limited, owing to the lack of a measureable, convenient functional trait for classification. In this study, we performed an experiment of stepwise organic amendments in triplicate anaerobic digesters. We found that high resource availability significantly favored microbial r-strategists such as Bacillus spp. Incremental resource availability heightened average rRNA operon copy number of microbial community, resulting in a strong, positive correlation ( r>0.74, P<0.008). This study quantifies how resource availability manipulations influence microbial community composition and supports the idea that rRNA operon copy number is an ecologically meaningful trait which reflects resource availability.

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rRNA operon copy number reflects ecological strategies of bacteria.

J A Klappenbach, J. Dunbar, T. Schmidt (2000)

Although natural selection appears to favor the elimination of gene redundancy in prokaryotes, multiple copies of each rRNA-encoding gene are common on bacterial chromosomes. Despite this conspicuous deviation from single-copy genes, no phenotype has been consistently associated with rRNA gene copy number. We found that the number of rRNA genes correlates with the rate at which phylogenetically diverse bacteria respond to resource availability. Soil bacteria that formed colonies rapidly upon exposure to a nutritionally complex medium contained an average of 5.5 copies of the small subunit rRNA gene, whereas bacteria that responded slowly contained an average of 1.4 copies. In soil microcosms pulsed with the herbicide 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D), indigenous populations of 2,4-D-degrading bacteria with multiple rRNA genes ( = 5.4) became dominant, whereas populations with fewer rRNA genes ( = 2.7) were favored in unamended controls. These findings demonstrate phenotypic effects associated with rRNA gene copy number that are indicative of ecological strategies influencing the structure of natural microbial communities.

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Species divergence and trait convergence in experimental plant community assembly

Tadashi Fukami, T. Martijn Bezemer, Simon R Mortimer … (2005)

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Exploiting rRNA Operon Copy Number to Investigate Bacterial Reproductive Strategies

Benjamin R.K. Roller, Steven Stoddard, Thomas M. Schmidt (2016)

Summary The potential for rapid reproduction is a hallmark of microbial life, but microbes in nature must also survive and compete when growth is constrained by resource availability. Successful reproduction requires different strategies when resources are scarce compared to when they are abundant 1,2 , but a systematic framework for predicting these reproductive strategies in bacteria has not been available. Here we show that the number of ribosomal RNA operons (rrn) in bacterial genomes predicts two important components of reproduction – growth rate and growth efficiency – which are favored under contrasting regimes of resource availability 3,4 . We find that the maximum reproductive rate of bacteria doubles with a doubling of rrn copy number, while the efficiency of carbon use is inversely related to maximal growth rate and rrn copy number. We also identify a feasible explanation for these patterns: the rate and yield of protein synthesis mirror the overall pattern in maximum growth rate and growth efficiency. Furthermore, comparative analysis of genomes from 1,167 bacterial species reveals that rrn copy number predicts traits associated with resource availability, including chemotaxis and genome streamlining. Genome-wide patterns of orthologous gene content covary with rrn copy number, suggesting convergent evolution in response to resource availability. Our findings indicate that basic cellular processes adapt in contrasting ways to long-term differences in resource availability. They also establish a basis for predicting changes in bacterial community composition in response to resource perturbations using rrn copy number measurements 5 or inferences 6,7 .