TY - JOUR TI - Relationships between community composition, productivity and invasion resistance in semi-natural bacterial microcosms AU - Jones, Matt Lloyd AU - Rivett, Damian William AU - Pascual-GarcĂ­a, Alberto AU - Bell, Thomas A2 - Schmid, Bernhard A2 - Weigel, Detlef VL - 10 PY - 2021 DA - 2021/10/18 SP - e71811 C1 - eLife 2021;10:e71811 DO - 10.7554/eLife.71811 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.71811 AB - Common garden experiments that inoculate a standardised growth medium with synthetic microbial communities (i.e. constructed from individual isolates or using dilution cultures) suggest that the ability of the community to resist invasions by additional microbial taxa can be predicted by the overall community productivity (broadly defined as cumulative cell density and/or growth rate). However, to the best of our knowledge, no common garden study has yet investigated the relationship between microbial community composition and invasion resistance in microcosms whose compositional differences reflect natural, rather than laboratory-designed, variation. We conducted experimental invasions of two bacterial strains (Pseudomonas fluorescens and Pseudomonas putida) into laboratory microcosms inoculated with 680 different mixtures of bacteria derived from naturally occurring microbial communities collected in the field. Using 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing to characterise microcosm starting composition, and high-throughput assays of community phenotypes including productivity and invader survival, we determined that productivity is a key predictor of invasion resistance in natural microbial communities, substantially mediating the effect of composition on invasion resistance. The results suggest that similar general principles govern invasion in artificial and natural communities, and that factors affecting resident community productivity should be a focal point for future microbial invasion experiments. KW - invasion KW - biotic resistance KW - productivity KW - microbial ecology KW - diversity KW - composition KW - community KW - bacteria JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -