Microbial rescue effects: How microbiomes can save hosts from extinction

Abstract

Environmental change is occurring across the globe at an unprecedented rate. With atmospheric CO 2 concentrations now exceeding 400 ppm (Blunden, Arndt, & Hartfield, 2018), global mean surface temperatures are rising (Stocker et al., 2013) and the world ocean is becoming more acidic (Gattuso et al., 2015). Habitat is being degraded and homogenized via land-use change while nutrient runoff from industrial-scale agriculture is expanding anoxic dead zones in coastal ecosystems (Foley, 2005; Stocker et al., 2013). Meanwhile, altered precipitation regimes are creating more intense and prolonged periods of drought and flooding that threaten our ability to reliably feed the growing human population (Trenberth, 2011). These and other global changes pose severe threats to the biodiversity of virtually all ecosystems on Earth. For species to persist in the face of widespread and rapid environmental change, it is important to identify biological mechanisms that can reverse trends of population decline. Some populations can achieve this by moving into more favourable habitats, for example, through the migration of heat-stressed individuals to sites at higher latitudes with cooler temperatures (Chen,

Lessons learned from COVID-19 on potentially pathogenic soil microorganisms

“…Solving these predicaments should entail: 1) enhancing crop diversity, rotating crops, and increasing plant spacing and the use of crop mixtures (Leclerc et al, 2013), and 2) introducing specific microbial associations in combination with microbiome-optimized plant genotypes, which can assist hosts to take up nutrients and enhance stress tolerance by stimulating their immune systems, with reduced inputs of chemical pesticides and fertilizers. Microbial rescue using probiotic supplements or microbiome engineering is a promising approach to maintain persistence in a changing world or to create desired functions (e.g., host immunity, nutrient supply and energy circulation) (Lawson et al, 2019;Mueller et al, 2019). The long road ahead, however, will require further research for understanding the interactions among microbiota and plant hosts and developing effective strategies to manipulate microbiota for preventing the emergence of infectious diseases, because this field of science is still young.…”

Microbiomes and Specific Symbionts of Social Spiders: Compositional Patterns in Host Species, Populations, and Nests

“…The biotic and abiotic factors that shape the diversity distribution of the microbiome within individuals and populations remain poorly understood (Adair and Douglas, 2017;Reese and Dunn, 2018), although they have important implications for our understanding of the functional significance of the microbiome in host adaptation. Symbiont-mediated adaptations have been hypothesized to be especially important in species with low genetic diversity (Mueller et al, 2019), since the possibility of evolutionary responses based on standing genetic variation of such hosts is reduced (Bell, 2013;Charlesworth et al, 2017;Ørsted et al, 2019).…”

“…Theoretically, this should result in drift-induced differentiation between populations, but recurrent extinction events that remove genetic variation, and recolonization events by single mated females causing strong founder effects, result in low species-wide genetic diversity (Settepani et al, 2017). Still, each spider species exists across large geographic and climatic distances ( Figures 1B,C), suggesting that adaptive responses could occur by other means than based on host genetic variation, e.g., through variation in microbiome composition (Mueller et al, 2019).…”

Cross-feeding modulates the rate and mechanism of antibiotic resistance evolution in a model microbial community of Escherichia coli and Salmonella enterica

“…For example, treatment with broad-spectrum antibiotics that inhibit both a pathogen and its obligate cross-feeding partners could slow the rate at which pathogens acquire resistance. More broadly the work provides data on the ongoing debate over how mutualisms will respond to our rapidly changing climate [55,56]. Our results suggest that organisms involved in obligate mutualisms, such as plant-pollinator interactions, may be constrained in their ability to adapt to abiotic stress.…”