Final Report Summary - REDUNDANCY (Functional redundancy of bacterial communities in the laboratory and in the wild)
Bacteria are the lynchpins of all ecosystems. Understanding how bacteria influence ecosystem functioning (e.g. decomposition) is therefore important both for the general understanding of how natural communities operate, and for industrial applications (e.g. sewage treatment). However, the enormous complexity of these communities has hindered progress. The project successfully developed new methods for disentangling the web of interactions among bacterial taxa by conducting controlled microcosm experiments using complex bacterial communities collected from natural environments. The project showed that different bacterial types (taxa) had different impacts on ecosystem functioning, and that there was substantial overlap in the functional roles of bacterial taxa. We showed that interactions among taxa were dynamic, so the influence of each taxon on ecosystem functioning was also dynamic. Importantly, we showed systematic differences in how bacterial taxa influenced ecosystem functioning according to the age and composition of the community, and to properties of the taxa under investigation (e.g. whether they are rare or common). This information provides a foothold for predicting how ecosystem functioning will respond to natural and anthropogenic changes to environmental conditions in the future.