The network method reveals the competitive relationship between Terobacteria and methane bacillus in different diversity levels of the community.

Deng Wei Research Group, a key laboratory of environmental biotechnology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has made progress in the study of the stability mechanism of microbiomes, providing new insights into the relationship between microbial diversity and ecosystem function, the results of which are published online in Molecular Ecology.
The relationship theory between biodiversity and ecosystem stability in macro-ecosystems has been discussed for many years, but there are few suitability experiments to apply this theory to microbial ecosystems because of the complexity of environmental microbial samples, the high diversity of species and the difficulty of processing them.
therefore, it is one of the urgent problems to be solved in the study of microbiome to explore the in-place interference of the community and establish an efficient and controllable microbiome pattern system.
biofilm community in the microbial electrolytic cell (MEC) has moderate species composition and easy-to-handle performance characteristics, which provides an ideal model platform for verifying the ecological theory in the microbial community.
Deng Wei Research Group, in collaboration with Wang Aijie Research Group, used MEC as a model system to construct different micro-biodiversity gradient reactors to explore the relationship between the resilience of biofilm groups under environmental pH disturbance and biodiversity.
the results show that the performance of the bioreator model shows good elastic resilience under pH perturbation.
, biofilm groups with high diversity levels can recover more quickly in function, indicating better recovery in response to environmental interference.
by using molecular ecological network analysis, it was found that in the microbial biofilm community with longer recovery time, the negative interaction between the two dominant genus, Geobacter and Methanobrevibacter, increased significantly, meaning that internal resources or spatial competition in key functional groups may have a significant impact on the recovery of biofilm community.
supports the theory of biodiversity and biological system stability in macro ecosystems, and also shows that MEC reactors can be used as model systems for microbial ecology research.
the research has been supported by the key research projects of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the water project of the Ministry of Science and Technology, the special project of strategic pilot science and technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the "100-person plan" project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
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