Determining Microbial Niche Breadth in the Environment for Better Ecosystem Fate Predictions

Abstract

Integrated omics applied to microbial communities offers a great opportunity to analyze the niche breadths (i.e., resource and condition ranges usable by a species) of constituent populations, ranging from generalists, with a broad niche breadth, to specialists, with a narrow one. In this context, extracellular metabolomics measurements describe resource spaces available to microbial populations; dedicated analyses of metagenomics data serve to describe the fundamental niches of constituent populations, and functional meta-omics becomes a proxy to characterize the realized niches of populations and their variations though time or space.