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Demonstrating microbial co-occurrence pattern analyses within and between ecosystems
Frontiers in Microbiology
  • Ryan J. Williams, Iowa State University
  • Adina C. Howe, Iowa State University
  • Kirsten S. Hofmockel, Iowa State University
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
7-18-2014
DOI
10.3389/fmicb.2014.00358
Abstract

Co-occurrence patterns are used in ecology to explore interactions between organisms and environmental effects on coexistence within biological communities. Analysis of co-occurrence patterns among microbial communities has ranged from simple pairwise comparisons between all community members to direct hypothesis testing between focal species. However, co-occurrence patterns are rarely studied across multiple ecosystems or multiple scales of biological organization within the same study. Here we outline an approach to produce co-occurrence analyses that are focused at three different scales: co-occurrence patterns between ecosystems at the community scale, modules of co-occurring microorganisms within communities, and co-occurring pairs within modules that are nested within microbial communities. To demonstrate our co-occurrence analysis approach, we gathered publicly available 16S rRNA amplicon datasets to compare and contrast microbial co-occurrence at different taxonomic levels across different ecosystems. We found differences in community composition and co-occurrence that reflect environmental filtering at the community scale and consistent pairwise occurrences that may be used to infer ecological traits about poorly understood microbial taxa. However, we also found that conclusions derived from applying network statistics to microbial relationships can vary depending on the taxonomic level chosen and criteria used to build co-occurrence networks. We present our statistical analysis and code for public use in analysis of co-occurrence patterns across microbial communities.

Comments

This article is from Frontiers in Microbiology 5 (2014): 358, doi:10.3389/fmicb.2014.00358. Posted with permission.

Rights
Copyright © 2014 Williams, Howe and Hofmockel. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Copyright Owner
Williams, Howe and Hofmockel
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Citation Information
Ryan J. Williams, Adina C. Howe and Kirsten S. Hofmockel. "Demonstrating microbial co-occurrence pattern analyses within and between ecosystems" Frontiers in Microbiology Vol. 5 (2014) p. 358
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/adina/5/