Relating Compositional & Functional Data in Microbial Soil Communities

Understanding how a microbial community’s function changes in response to environmental perturbations has a range of applications, from the medical to combatting climate change. However, community function arises from the coupled dynamics of the environment and the microbial community. To understand the ecological mechanisms behind functional changes, it is necessary to relate both the compositional and environmental dynamics to the functional dynamics. Previous work¹ studying wild soil communities performing denitrification has shown that a coarse-grained model that treats all denitrifying taxa as a single “functional biomass” accurately characterizes functional dynamics across environmental perturbations in these communities. Using 16s sequencing data from the same experiments, we now investigate the quantitative agreement between the compositional & functional dynamics of these natural soil communities.

1. Lee, K. et al. Functional regimes define the response of the soil microbiome to environmental change. In review, Biorxiv. (2024)