TY - JOUR T1 - Phylogenetic organization of bacterial activity. JF - The ISME journal Y1 - 2016 A1 - Ember M Morrissey A1 - Mau,Rebecca L A1 - Egbert Schwartz A1 - Caporaso,J Gregory A1 - P Dijkstra A1 - van Gestel,Natasja A1 - BJ Koch A1 - Liu,Cindy M A1 - Hayer,Michaela A1 - McHugh,Theresa A A1 - Jane C Marks A1 - Lance B Price A1 - Hungate,Bruce A KW - Bacteria KW - Biological Evolution KW - Carbon Isotopes KW - Ecology KW - Ecosystem KW - Oxygen Isotopes KW - Phenotype KW - Phylogeny AB -

Phylogeny is an ecologically meaningful way to classify plants and animals, as closely related taxa frequently have similar ecological characteristics, functional traits and effects on ecosystem processes. For bacteria, however, phylogeny has been argued to be an unreliable indicator of an organism's ecology owing to evolutionary processes more common to microbes such as gene loss and lateral gene transfer, as well as convergent evolution. Here we use advanced stable isotope probing with (13)C and (18)O to show that evolutionary history has ecological significance for in situ bacterial activity. Phylogenetic organization in the activity of bacteria sets the stage for characterizing the functional attributes of bacterial taxonomic groups. Connecting identity with function in this way will allow scientists to begin building a mechanistic understanding of how bacterial community composition regulates critical ecosystem functions.

VL - 10 SN - 1751-7362 UR - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&DbFrom=pubmed&Cmd=Link&LinkName=pubmed_pubmed&LinkReadableName=Related%20Articles&IdsFromResult=26943624&ordinalpos=3&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSumhttp://www.ncbi. IS - 9 ER -