Why are some microbes more ubiquitous than others? Predicting the habitat breadth of soil bacteria

Background/Question/Methods

For decades, ecologists have sought to identify the traits associated with differences in animal and plant range sizes, a key ecological attribute and an important determinant of community assembly patterns. However, identifying the traits that determine the distribution of microorganisms is far more challenging given that their phenotypic characteristics often remain unknown. We determined the spatial distributions of ~124,000 soil bacterial taxa across a 3.41 km² area.

Results/Conclusions

We found that occupancy was strongly correlated with environmental range; taxa that were more ubiquitous were found across a greater extent of soil conditions. We then determined whether we could use phylogeny and/or genomic traits to explain differences in habitat breadth, where genomic trait information was available for ~500 taxa. Genomic traits were more useful than phylogeny alone in explaining the variation in habitat breadth; bacteria with larger genomes and more metabolic versatility were more likely to have larger environmental and geographical distributions.