Community conservatism is widespread throughout microbial phyla and environments

Abstract

Evolution gives rise to various long-term phenomena, including Phylogenetic signal, which describes the tendency of related biological taxa to resemble each other in morphology and function. Related taxa tend to also live in similar ecological niches - this trend is termed Niche conservatism. Both concepts are widely used to understand crucial aspects of evolu1on and specia1on and are well-established in animals and plants. The extension of these concepts to microorganisms is however challenging and thus far only assumed. Here, we hypothesize that two closely related microbial species, if indeed similar in both their morphology and their ecological niche, should be found in samples with similar community compositions. We propose "community conservatism" to refer to this, and leverage a database with millions of samples and hundreds of thousands of pairs of microbial taxa to assess their relatedness and the similarity of the communities they occupy. Our findings reveal that community conservatism can be observed globally in all environments and phyla tested, to varying extents. Ecologically specialized taxa show a stronger community conservatism signal than generalists, and the signal can be discerned over nearly all taxonomic ranks. Analyzing community conservatism shows promise to advance our understanding of evolution, speciation, and the mechanisms governing community assembly in microorganisms. Furthermore, we propose it can be used to reintegrate ecological parameters into Operational Taxonomic Unit delimitation.