Great collaboration published in Cell Reports
| by Ana Depetris Chauvin
We are delighted to share that our work “A global survey of host, aquatic, and soil microbiomes reveals shared abundance and genomic features between bacterial and fungal generalists” has been published in the Journal Cell Reports.
In a great collaboration with the Fungal Informatics group at Friedrich Schiller University led by Amelia Barber, we have conducted a global survey of microbial communities across different environments to study which bacteria and fungi fit across a wide range of conditions.
Environmental changes due to pollution, the climate crisis, and alterations in host lifestyle are drastically impacting microbial communities across environmental and host ecosystems. Despite this clear impact, which bacteria and fungi are indeed more susceptible (or more resistant) to change is still unclear.
In our article published in Cell Reports, we found that some bacteria and fungi are generalists, meaning that they can flourish in different environments, while others are specialists. Interestingly, generalist groups have larger genomes and, at least in the case of bacteria, have more biosynthetic and antimicrobial genes, suggesting that they are better prepared to deal with different environmental stressors. We also found that generalists play a crucial role in shaping microbial communities, even at a cross-kingdom level.
Our findings contribute to understanding microbial niche breadth and its consequences for global biodiversity loss.
We congratulate the first authors Daniel Loos (MBD’s alumni) and Ailton Pereira da Costa Filho (Amelia Barber’s lab), and our external collaborator Bas E Dutilh. We are very grateful to our funding sources from the German agency DFG (EXC 20151), who make this work possible.
Original Publication
Loos D*, Pereira da Costa Filho A*, Dutilh B E, Barber AE#, and Panagiotou G# (2024). A global survey of host, aquatic, and soil microbiomes reveals shared abundance and genomic features between bacterial and fungal generalists. Cell Reports. DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2024.114046
* These authors contributed equally to this work.
# Corresponding authors.
Figure Caption: Graphical summary of the study.