Bacterial Community Diversity Dynamics Highlight Degrees of Nestedness and Turnover Patterns

Abstract Bacterial communities change their structure rapidly due to short generation times of their members. How bacteria assemble to certain structures provides insight into ecological mechanisms that shape a bacterial community. Microbial community flow cytometry was used to create community fingerprints based on subcommunity distributions and to visualize the dynamic variations of 10 independently grown communities under equal conditions. Inventory diversity values were recorded by α‐ and γ‐diversity whereas the degree of subsistence of subcommunities (nestedness) and the degree of gain or loss of subcommunities (turnover) was calculated as multi‐sites ß‐diversity terms ß NES and ß SIM . Numbers of unique subcommunities of pairwise samples were determined by intra‐ and inter‐community ß‐diversity values. Although all communities were exposed to niche‐differentiating conditions they assembled to disparate structures. In our study, the turnover coefficients were high (> 0.6), while the nestedness coefficients were complementary low in the separate 10 bioreactors. Intra‐ and inter‐community ß‐diversity values indicated fast community shifts. Microbial community flow cytometry straightforwardly identifies the dominance and subsistence of subsets of cells in a community or the degree of their replacement. The calculation of either turnover or nestedness patterns might have implications in medical, biotechnological, or environmental research. © 2020 The Authors. Cytometry Part A published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of International Society for Advancement of Cytometry.