Microbial assembly, interaction, functioning, activity and diversification: a review derived from community compositional data

Abstract

Microorganisms play crucial roles in maintaining ecosystem stability. The last two decades have witnessed an upsurge in studies on marine microbial community composition using high-throughput sequencing methods. Extensive mining of the compositional data has provided exciting new insights into marine microbial ecology from a number of perspectives. Both deterministic and stochastic processes contribute to microbial community assembly but their relative importance in structuring subcommunities, that are categorized by traits such as abundance, functional type and activity, differs. Through correlation-based network analysis, significant progress has been made in unraveling microbial co-occurrence patterns and dynamics in response to environmental changes. Prediction of ecosystem functioning, based on microbial data, is receiving increasing attention, as closely related microbes often share similar ecological traits and microbial diversity often exhibits significant correlations to ecosystem functioning. The ecosystem functioning is likely executed not by the whole community, but rather by an active fraction of a community, which can be inferred from the marker gene transcription level of community members. Furthermore, the huge amount of microbial community data has significantly expanded the tree of life and illuminated microbial phylogenetic divergence and evolutionary history. This review summarizes important findings in microbial assembly, interaction, functioning, activity and diversification, highlighting the interacting roles of different aspects, derived from community compositional data.