Microbial assembly, interaction, functioning, activity and diversifcation: a review derived from community compositional data

Microorganisms play crucial roles in maintaining ecosystem stability. The last two decades have witnessed an upsurge in studies on marine microbial community composition using high-throughput sequencing methods. Extensive mining of the compositional data has provided exciting new insights into marine microbial ecology from a number of perspectives. Both deterministic and stochastic processes contribute to microbial community assembly but their relative importance in structuring subcommunities,that are categorized by traits such as abundance,functional type and activity,difers. Through correlation-based network analysis,signifcant progress has been made in unraveling microbial co-occurrence patterns and dynamics in response to environmental changes. Prediction of ecosystem functioning,based on microbial data,is receiving increasing attention,as closely related microbes often share similar ecological traits and microbial diversity often exhibits signifcant correlations to ecosystem functioning. The ecosystem functioning is likely executed not by the whole community,but rather by an active fraction of a community,which can be inferred from the marker gene transcription level of community members. Furthermore,the huge amount of microbial community data has signifcantly expanded the tree of life and illuminated microbial phylogenetic divergence and evolutionary history. This review summarizes important fndings in microbial assembly,interaction,functioning,activity and diversifcation,highlighting the interacting roles of diferent aspects,derived from community compositional data.