Category Archives: microbes

Introducing the Microbial Ecology of Changing Environments Collection

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We are very pleased to be launching our Microbial Ecology in Changing Environments Collection, the product of a call for papers convened by PLOS ONE and our Guest Editors, Melissa Cregger and Stephanie Kivlin. The research in the Collection crosses disciplinary boundaries and represents a wide range of geographies, providing a snapshot of the diversity of research in contemporary microbial ecology. More articles will be added in due course, so please check back for updates!

Several articles highlighted in the Collection address the structure and dynamics of microbial communities in marine or aquatic environments. Three North American studies feature in the initial set of articles. Working in the Southern Californian Bight, Larkin and colleagues explored the effect of El Niño events on cyanobacterial populations [1]. Meanwhile, Vogel and colleagues found evidence for environmental and host-specific influences on microbial community structure on seagrass off the coast of Florida [2]. Finally, using a wetland mesocosm in Connecticut, Donato and co-workers performed an integrative study of microbial and plant responses to simulated chemical pollution [3].

The impact of natural disturbance on microbial communities was another theme that emerged in submissions to the Collection. In this first batch of articles, this is represented by the work of Eaton and colleagues, who examined how a major hurricane affected soil microbes in primary forests in Costa Rica [4].

The microbial ecology of manmade environments also features in the Collection. Maguvu and co-workers analysed the microbiome and physicochemical properties of drinking water production plants in South Africa, identifying significant variation in microbial community structure between facilities [5].

Last but not least, the Collection includes new research on the relationships between microbial communities living in dynamic environments within host organisms. Working in the UK, Garber and colleagues examined the effect of abrupt dietary changes in ponies on gut microbiota, with important implications for animal management [6].

The research in the Collection provides valuable insights into the mechanisms and consequences of microbial interactions with dynamic environments, and highlights the broad range of systems in which scientists are actively engaged in elucidating these phenomena.

References

  1. Larkin AA, Moreno AR, Fagan AJ, Fowlds A, Ruiz A, Martiny AC (2020) Persistent El Niño driven shifts in marine cyanobacteria populations. PLoS ONE 15(9): e0238405. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238405
  2. Vogel MA, Mason OU, Miller TE (2020) Host and environmental determinants of microbial community structure in the marine phyllosphere. PLoS ONE 15(7): e0235441. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235441
  3. Donato M, Johnson O, Steven B, Lawrence BA (2020) Nitrogen enrichment stimulates wetland plant responses whereas salt amendments alter sediment microbial communities and biogeochemical responses. PLoS ONE 15(7): e0235225. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235225
  4. Eaton WD, McGee KM, Alderfer K, Jimenez AR, Hajibabaei M (2020) Increase in abundance and decrease in richness of soil microbes following Hurricane Otto in three primary forest types in the Northern Zone of Costa Rica. PLoS ONE 15(7): e0231187. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231187
  5. Maguvu TE, Bezuidenhout CC, Kritzinger R, Tsholo K, Plaatjie M, Molale-Tom LG, et al. (2020) Combining physicochemical properties and microbiome data to evaluate the water quality of South African drinking water production plants. PLoS ONE 15(8): e0237335. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0237335
  6. Garber A, Hastie P, McGuinness D, Malarange P, Murray J-A (2020) Abrupt dietary changes between grass and hay alter faecal microbiota of ponies. PLoS ONE 15(8): e0237869. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0237869

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It’s the little things- An interview with the Guest Editors of our Microbial Ecology of Changing Environments Call for Papers

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PLOS ONE has an open Call for Papers on the Microbial Ecology of Changing Environments, with selected submissions to be featured in an upcoming Collection. We aim to highlight a range of interdisciplinary articles showcasing

It’s the little things- An interview with the Guest Editors of our Microbial Ecology of Changing Environments Call for Papers

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PLOS ONE has an open Call for Papers on the Microbial Ecology of Changing Environments, with selected submissions to be featured in an upcoming Collection. We aim to highlight a range of interdisciplinary articles showcasing the diversity of systems, scales, interactions and applications in this dynamic field of research.

We spoke to the Guest Editors for this project, Melissa Cregger and Stephanie Kivlin, about what motivates their research and the challenges and opportunities faced by microbial ecologists.

 

What makes microbes so interesting?

MC: Microorganisms are everywhere and are important members of all of the ecosystems they inhabit. There are microorganisms in soils, oceans, lakes, and even within our bodies. Within all of these habitats they are performing really important functions. In lakes, oceans, and soils, microorganisms are key to moving nutrients around. Within our bodies, they aid in things like digestion and disease prevention.

SK: Microorganisms are fascinating in how genetically diverse and numerous they are. Microorganisms can be found in almost every habitat on Earth and are often the first to respond to environmental disturbance and global change. Thus, microorganisms likely hold the key to solving most of Earth’s problems as we face global climate change.

 

How is microbial ecology relevant to major environmental and societal issues like climate change and food security?

MC: Given how ubiquitous microorganisms are across the world, understanding how they function is key if we want to understand and mitigate the consequences of climatic change and if we want to grow food more sustainably and in marginal lands. For instance, if we can get a better understanding of microbial carbon cycling, we can potentially use biological carbon capture as a mitigation strategy to help combat rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Additionally, researchers around the world are trying to understand how plants interact with microbial communities in an effort to harness these microbes to increase food production and the ability of plants to withstand changing abiotic conditions.

SK: Microorganisms are the key for innovating nature-based solutions to climate change. For example, specific fungal symbionts of plants can be tailored to increase agricultural plant drought tolerance. Other microorganisms may be deployed to remediate oil spills or other man-made pollutants. Finally, engineering plant-microbial associations may lead to a larger terrestrial carbon sink to offset atmospheric CO2 concentrations, creating a negative feedback to climate change itself.

 

Tell us a bit about your own research and how it ties in with some of these issues.

MC:  A large portion of my research is focused on understanding how to use beneficial microbes to increase plant productivity and tolerance to drought, and also in understanding how these communities function in the soil environment with the ultimate goal of using them to enhance ecosystem stability. I am part of two large multi-disciplinary teams at Oak Ridge National Laboratory that are specifically focused on plant-microbe interactions in the potential biofuel feedstock, Populus. We are trying to characterize basic principles governing plant-microbe interactions in the hope of making Populus a better biofuel that can grow in marginal lands with limited input of fertilizer and water.

SK: Research in the Kivlin Lab aims to create distribution models for terrestrial microorganisms and their functions. Our current focus is on arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi, as these plant symbionts are the main providers of nutrients and drought tolerance to agricultural plants. We are interested in where these fungi are, the ecosystem-level carbon and nutrient cycling they promote and how sensitive these plant-fungal interactions may be to climate change. To address these questions, we both compile data on AM fungal distributions worldwide, but also examine plant-AM fungal interactions along altitudinal gradients that serve as a space for time substitution for climate change and in long-term climate change experiments.

 

How are technological advances opening up new opportunities in your field?

MC: Over the last 20 years there have been rapid advances in sequencing and molecular techniques that have enabled amazing opportunities in microbial and ecosystem ecology. We are finally able to identify unculturable microorganisms inhabiting diverse communities using next generation sequencing and are getting clues into their function using metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics. Further, using these techniques, people are developing some new strategies to culture more microbes.

SK: It is increasingly clear that the genomics revolution has impacted microbial ecology. We now can link functional genetic potential to microorganisms in environmental microbiomes and understand how interactions among microorganisms and between microorganisms and plants control expression of these functional genes and the metabolites they code for.

 

How does microbial ecology benefit from interdisciplinary collaboration?

MC: Microbial communities are incredibly complex, therefore understanding their role in ecosystems really requires a systems biology approach. Because of this, having an interdisciplinary team to tackle questions at various scales is really important.

SK: Microbial ecology is inherently interdisciplinary. We collaborate with earth system modelers to scale microbial function from the organism to the globe and with geneticists to understand the genetic underpinnings of those functions. Without these collaborations, our field would be siloed to case-studies of microbial communities and lack the ability to develop first-principles theory across microbial communities and environments.

 

What are some of the biggest unsolved questions in microbial ecology?

MC: There are so many unsolved questions in microbial ecology that it is hard to just identify a few. We still have a limited understanding of how microbial communities fluctuate through time. How stable are they within ecosystems? Are organisms within communities functionally redundant? Does this redundancy aid in resilience of the community post disturbance? How do these communities respond to fluctuations in abiotic variables? I could really go on and on.

SK: Despite all of the vital roles that microorganisms provide in the environment, we still don’t understand (1) where microorganisms even are spatially and what abiotic and biotic processes control these distributions, or (2) how temporally dynamic microbial communities are both within and among plant growing seasons. Answering these fundamental questions will allow us to understand linkages between microbial communities and plant growth, microbial composition and ecosystem carbon and nutrient cycles, and allow us to effectively manipulate microbial consortia for societal gain in agricultural and bioremediation settings.

 

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From Penguins to Frogs: The new frontier of wildlife microbiomes

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With recent technological advances in DNA sequencing investigating microbiomes from all areas of life has become possible as PLOS ONE Publication Assistant Maija Mallula finds out. With the advancement of DNA sequencing technology, our ability

Small Talk: When Bacterial Chatter Gets Invasive

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Sticks and stones may break our bones but microbes’ “words” may hurt us. Breast cancer is a threat to men and women worldwide. Like all cancers, the known causes are attributed to genetics and carcinogens, but recently, scientists have begun … Continue reading »

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Rainforest Fungi Find Home in Sloth Hair

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Bradypus_variegatusMost of us have seen a cute sloth video or two on the Internet. Their squished faces, long claws, and scruffy fur make these slow-moving mammals irresistible, but our furry friends aren’t just amusing Internet sensations. Like most inhabitants of the rainforest, little is known about the role sloths play in the rainforest ecosystem.

Three-toed sloths live most of their lives in the trees of Central and South American rainforests. Rainforests are some of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the world and home to a wide variety of organisms, some of which can be found in rather unusual places.

Due to their vast biodiversity, rainforests have been the source for a wide variety of new medicines, and researchers of this PLOS ONE study sought to uncover whether sloth hair may also contain potential new sources of drugs that could one day treat vector-borne diseases, cancer, or bacterial infections. Why look in sloth fur? It turns out that sloths carry a wide variety of micro- and macro-organisms in their fur, which consists of two layers: an inner layer of fine, soft hair close to the skin, and a long outer layer of coarse hair with “cracks” across it where microbes make their homes. The most well-known inhabitant of sloth fur is green algae. In some cases, the green algae makes the sloth actually appear green, providing a rainforest camouflage.

In the study, seventy-four separate fungi were obtained from the surface of coarse outer hair that were clipped from the lower back of nine living three-toed sloths in Soberanía National Park, Panama, and were cultivated and tested for bioactivity in the lab.

Researchers found a broad range of in vitro activities of the fungi against bugs that cause malaria and Chagas disease, as well as against a specific type of human breast cancer cells. In addition, 20 fungal extracts were active in vitro against at least one bacterial strain. The results may provide for the first time an indication of the biodiversity and bioactivity of microorganisms in sloth hair.

Since sloths are moving around in one of the most diverse ecosystems in the world, it’s possible that they may pick up “hitchhikers,” so the researchers can’t be sure how these fungi came to live on the sloth fur. They may even have a symbiotic relationship with the green algae. However the fungi ended up in the fur, the authors suggest their presence in the ecosystem provides support for the role biodiversity plays both in the rainforest and potentially our daily lives.

Citation: Higginbotham S, Wong WR, Linington RG, Spadafora C, Iturrado L, et al. (2014) Sloth Hair as a Novel Source of Fungi with Potent Anti-Parasitic, Anti-Cancer and Anti-Bacterial Bioactivity. PLoS ONE 9(1): e84549. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0084549

Image: Bradypus variegates by Christian Mehlführer

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Marine microbes make musical waves

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Music may be the newest addition to a science communicator’s toolbox. A PLOS ONE paper published today describes an algorithm that represents terabytes of microbial and environmental data in tunes that sound remarkably like modern jazz.

“Microbial bebop”, as the authors describe it, is created using five years’ worth of consecutive measurements of ocean microbial life and environmental factors like temperature, dissolved salts and chlorophyll concentrations. These diverse, extensive data are only a subset of what scientists have been recording at the Western Channel Observatory since 1903.

As first author Larsen explained to the Wired blogs, “It’s my job to take complex data sets and find ways to represent that data in a way that makes the patterns accessible to human observations. There’s no way to look at 10,000 rows and hundreds of columns and intuit what’s going on.”

Each of the four compositions in the paper is derived from the same set of data, but highlights different relationships between the environmental conditions of the ocean and the microbes that live in these waters.

“There are certain parameters like sunlight, temperature or the concentration of phosphorus in the water that give a kind of structure to the data and determine the microbial populations. This structure provides us with an intuitive way to use music to describe a wide range of natural phenomena,” explains Larsen in an Argonne National Laboratories article.

Speaking to Living on Earth, Larsen describes how their music highlights the relationship between different kinds of data. “In most of the pieces that we have posted, the melody is derived from a numerical measurement, such that the lowest measure is the lowest note and the highest measure is the highest note. The other component is the chords. And the chords map to a different component of the data.”

As a result, the music generated from microbial abundance data played to chords generated from phosphorus concentration data will sound quite different from the same microbial data played to chords derived from temperature data.

“Songs themselves probably are never going to actively replace, you know, the bar graph for data analysis, but I think that this kind of translation of complex data into a very accessible format is an opportunity to lead people who probably aren’t highly aware of the importance of microbial ecology in the ocean, and give them a very appealing entry into this kind of data”, explained Larsen in the same interview with Living on Earth.

Though their primary intent was to create novel way to symbolize the interactions of microbes in the ocean, the study also suggests that microbial bebop may eventually have applications in crowd-sourcing solutions to complex environmental issues.

For further reading, a PLOS ONE paper in 2010 demonstrated that the metaphors used to explain a problem could have a powerful impact on people’s thoughts and decisions when designing solutions. Could re-phrasing complex environmental data in music lead to solutions we haven’t heard yet? As you ponder the question, listen to some microbial bebop!

Other media sources that also covered this research include LiveScience, gizmag and the PLOS blog Tooth and Claw

Citations:  Larsen P, Gilbert J (2013) Microbial Bebop: Creating Music from Complex Dynamics in Microbial Ecology. PLoS ONE 8(3): e58119. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0058119

Thibodeau PH, Boroditsky L (2011) Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning. PLoS ONE 6(2): e16782. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0016782

Image: sheet music by jamuraa on Flickr