The Biogeography of Putative Microbial Antibiotic Production
Name
Morlon-2015-The Biogeography of.pdf
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1.33 MB
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Author(s)
O'Connor, Timothy K.
Charkoudian, Louise K.
Docherty, Kathryn M.
Jones, Evan
Kembel, Steven W.
Green, Jessica L.
Bohannan, Brendan J. M.
Bryant, Jessica A.
Morlon, Helene
Date Issued
June 2015
Journal
PLOS ONE
Publisher
Public Library of Science
Citation
Morlon, Hélène, Timothy K. O’Connor, Jessica A. Bryant, Louise K. Charkoudian, Kathryn M. Docherty, Evan Jones, Steven W. Kembel, Jessica L. Green, and Brendan J. M. Bohannan. “The Biogeography of Putative Microbial Antibiotic Production.” Edited by Hauke Smidt. PLoS ONE 10, no. 6 (June 23, 2015): e0130659.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Understanding patterns in the distribution and abundance of functional traits across a landscape is of fundamental importance to ecology. Mapping these distributions is particularly challenging for species-rich groups with sparse trait measurement coverage, such as flowering plants, insects, and microorganisms. Here, we use likelihood-based character reconstruction to infer and analyze the spatial distribution of unmeasured traits. We apply this framework to a microbial dataset comprised of 11,732 ketosynthase alpha gene sequences extracted from 144 soil samples from three continents to document the spatial distribution of putative microbial polyketide antibiotic production. Antibiotic production is a key competitive strategy for soil microbial survival and performance. Additionally, novel antibiotic discovery is highly relevant to human health, making natural antibiotic production by soil microorganisms a major target for bioprospecting. Our comparison of trait-based biogeographical patterns to patterns based on taxonomy and phylogeny is relevant to our basic understanding of microbial biogeography as well as the pressing need for new antibiotics.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
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Creative Commons Attribution
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0130659
