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The DOI matches its Crossref record; 81 of the 81 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Bacterial community assembly based on functional genes rather than species

Open access
Burke, Catherine, Steinberg, Peter, Rusch, Doug, Kjelleberg, Staffan, Thomas, Torsten·2011·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Abstract

The principles underlying the assembly and structure of complex microbial communities are an issue of long-standing concern to the field of microbial ecology. We previously analyzed the community membership of bacterial communities associated with the green macroalga Ulva australis , and proposed a competitive lottery model for colonization of the algal surface in an attempt to explain the surprising lack of similarity in species composition across different algal samples. Here we extend the previous study by investigating the link between community structure and function in these communities, using metagenomic sequence analysis. Despite the high phylogenetic variability in microbial species composition on different U. australis (only 15% similarity between samples), similarity in functional composition was high (70%), and a core of functional genes present across all algal-associated communities was identified that were consistent with the ecology of surface- and host-associated bacteria. These functions were distributed widely across a variety of taxa or phylogenetic groups. This observation of similarity in habitat (niche) use with respect to functional genes, but not species, together with the relative ease with which bacteria share genetic material, suggests that the key level at which to address the assembly and structure of bacterial communities may not be “species” (by means of rRNA taxonomy), but rather the more functional level of genes.

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Metadata

Authors
Burke, C., Steinberg, P., Rusch, D., Kjelleberg, S., & Thomas, T.
Venue
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Published
2011-08-08
Volume
108
Issue
34
Pages
14288-14293
ISSN
  • 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
  • 1091-6490
OpenAlex
W2097557545
Cited by
852
References
81
FWCI
31.93
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Bacterial community assembly based on functional genes rather than species. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1073/pnas.1101591108
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Burke, C., Steinberg, P., Rusch, D., Kjelleberg, S., & Thomas, T. (2011). Bacterial community assembly based on functional genes rather than species. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1101591108

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.