A research team led by Wu Haizhou at Huazhong Agricultural University's College of Food Science and Technology has made advancements in microbial ecology, with Célio Dias Santos-Júnior publishing a study that connects resource availability with microbial competition through genomic niche partitioning.

The paper, titled Resource availability structures microbial competition through genomic niche partitioning, was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Santos-Junior from HZAU served as the first and corresponding author, as noted by the university's College of Food Science and Technology.

Microbial competition for limited resources is crucial in shaping biodiversity patterns and ecosystem functions across global biomes. However, predicting how microorganisms compete and coexist using genomic data has been a longstanding challenge.

The study introduced CaCo, a scalable metric that uses metagenomic carbohydrate-active enzyme profiles to assess niche overlap and competition potential. By analyzing 14,691 high-quality metagenome-assembled genomes from ocean, freshwater, soil, and human gut microbiomes, the researchers discovered a macroecological pattern: niche overlap increases with resource availability.

The findings indicate that microbes in nutrient-poor ocean environments tend to be more specialized and occupy more distinct niches, while microbes in carbon-rich environments, such as the human gut, tend to be more generalist, with greater niche overlap. The study also found that phylogenetic relatedness can intensify competition, supporting the ecological principle of limiting similarity.

The team validated the metric through BIOLOG phenotypes, synthetic communities, and interaction assays, showing that CaCo can help bridge genomic potential with ecological reality.

The research provides a new framework for predicting microbial competition and community structure, offering insights that could support future studies of microbiome stability, ecosystem responses, and environmental change.

Célio Dias Santos-Júnior's study provides new insight into microbial competition and genomic niche partitioning. [Photo/news.hzau.edu.cn]