Microbial consortium

A microbial consortium or microbial community, is two or more bacterial or microbial groups living symbiotically.[1][2] Consortiums can be endosymbiotic or ectosymbiotic, or occasionally may be both. The protist Mixotricha paradoxa, itself an endosymbiont of the Mastotermes darwiniensis termite, is always found as a consortium of at least one endosymbiotic coccus, multiple ectosymbiotic species of flagellate or ciliate bacteria, and at least one species of helical Treponema bacteria that forms the basis of Mixotricha protists' locomotion.[3]

The concept of a consortium was first introduced by Johannes Reinke in 1872,[4][5] and in 1877 the term symbiosis was introduced and later expanded on. Evidence for symbiosis between microbes strongly suggests it to have been a necessary precursor of the evolution of land plants and for their transition from algal communities in the sea to land.[6]

  1. ^ Madigan, M; Bender, K; Buckley, D; Sattley, W; Stahl, D (2019). Brock biology of microorganisms (Fifteenth, Global ed.). New York, NY: Pearson. p. 173. ISBN 9781292235103.
  2. ^ Mark, Martin (2009-04-27). "Happy Together… Life of the Bacterial Consortium Chlorochromatium aggregatum". Small Things Considered - The Microbe Blog. American Society for Microbiology. Archived from the original on 2009-05-01. Retrieved 2012-01-11. Consortia are assemblages of different species of microbes in physical (and sometimes intricate biochemical) contact with one another, and are implicated in biological processes ranging from sewage treatment to marine nitrogen cycling to metabolic processes within the rumen.
  3. ^ Thompson, William Irwin (1991). Gaia 2 : emergence : the new science of becoming. Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press. pp. 51–58. ISBN 9780940262409.
  4. ^ Reinke, Johannes 1872. Ueber die anatomischen Verhältnisse einiger Arten von Gunnera L. Nachrichten von der Königl. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften und der Georg-Augusts-Universität zu Göttingen 9: 100–108.
  5. ^ Kull, Kalevi 2010. Ecosystems are made of semiosic bonds: Consortia, umwelten, biophony and ecological codes. Biosemiotics 3(3): 347–357.
  6. ^ Delaux, Pierre-Marc; Radhakrishnan, Guru V.; Jayaraman, Dhileepkumar; Cheema, Jitender; Malbreil, Mathilde; Volkening, Jeremy D.; Sekimoto, Hiroyuki; Nishiyama, Tomoaki; Melkonian, Michael (2015-10-27). "Algal ancestor of land plants was preadapted for symbiosis". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 112 (43): 13390–13395. Bibcode:2015PNAS..11213390D. doi:10.1073/pnas.1515426112. PMC 4629359. PMID 26438870.