Metabolic ecology, microbial community structure, and gene-centric metagenomics

Abstract

Metabolic ecology includes predictions for biological rates from molecules to ecosystems, but despite the broad range of its scope, its applicability to metagenomes remains an open question. Here, we integrate metabolic ecology with principles of DNA shotgun sequencing to generate specific testable predictions for the metagenomic structure of microbial communities. We start by predicting a scaling relationship between population and assemblage abundance with genome size. This allows us to simplify DNA shotgun sequencing equations for the reads of a population and a gene. Then we derive the temperature dependence of population and assemblage abundance using the volume-temperature and abundance-volume rules and integrate them with simplified DNA sequencing equations to show that these predictions are compatible with a metagenomic framework. In addition, we derive predictions for the temperature dependence of the structure (abundance and richness) of genes and groups of related genes (e.g., metabolic pathways). To test our model, we provide some example data from human, aquatic, and terrestrial microbiomes from recent global projects. All predictions were supported by the observed data. Our model, derived from the integration of first principles, provides a mechanistic basis for variation in the structure of microbial community genomes in environmental and host-associated ecosystems.