Fungal infection alters the selection, dispersal, and drift processes structuring the amphibian skin microbiome

Symbiotic microbial communities are important for host health, but the processes shaping these communities are poorly understood. Understanding how community assembly processes jointly affect microbial community composition is limited because inflexible community models rely on rejecting dispersal and drift before considering selection. We developed a flexible community assembly model based on neutral theory to ask: How do dispersal, drift, and selection concurrently affect the microbiome across environmental gradients? We applied this approach to examine how a fungal pathogen affected the assembly processes structuring the amphibian skin microbiome. We found that the rejection of neutrality for the amphibian microbiome across a fungal gradient was not strictly due to selection processes, but was also a result of species-specific changes in dispersal and drift. Our modeling framework brings the qualitative recognition that niche and neutral processes jointly structure microbiomes into q...

共生微生物群落对宿主健康至关重要，但目前学界对塑造此类群落的具体过程仍知之甚少。由于传统僵化的群落模型往往在考量选择（selection）作用前便先行排除了扩散（dispersal）与漂变（drift）的影响，因此我们对群落组装过程如何共同影响微生物群落组成的认知仍存在显著局限。我们基于中性理论（neutral theory）构建了灵活的群落组装模型，以探究：在环境梯度下，扩散、漂变与选择作用如何共同影响微生物组（microbiome）？我们将该建模方法应用于研究，以分析真菌病原体如何调控两栖动物皮肤微生物组的组装过程。研究发现，在真菌梯度下，两栖动物微生物组所呈现出的中性理论偏离现象，并非仅由选择过程导致，同时也源于物种特异性的扩散与漂变变化。我们的建模框架将"生态位（niche）与中性过程共同塑造微生物组"这一定性认知，推进至可量化的研究q……