Ecological networks of dissolved organic matter and microorganisms under global change
Experimental designThe comparative field microcosm experiments were conducted on Laojun Mountain in China (26.6959 N; 99.7759 E) in September–October 2013, and on Balggesvarri Mountain in Norway (69.3809 N; 20.3483 E) in July 2013, designed to be broadly representative of subtropical and subarctic climatic zones, respectively, as first reported in Wang et al.29. In the Laojun Mountain region, mean annual temperatures ranged from 4.2 to 12.9 °C, with July mean temperatures of 17–25 °C. In the Balggesvarri Mountain region, mean annual temperatures ranged from −2.9 to 0.7 °C, with July mean temperatures of 8–16 °C. The experiments were characterised by an aquatic ecosystem with consistent initial DOM composition but different locally colonised microbial communities and newly produced endogenous DOM. While allowing us to minimise the complexity of natural ecosystems, the experiment provided a means for investigating DOM-microbe associations at large spatial scales by controlling the initial DOM supply. Briefly, we selected locations with five different elevations on each mountainside. The elevations were 3822, 3505, 2915, 2580 and 2286 m a.s.l. on Laojun Mountain in China, and 750, 550, 350, 170 and 20 m a.s.l. on Balggesvarri Mountain in Norway. At each elevation, we established 30 aquatic microcosms (1.5 L bottle) composed of 15 g of sterilised lake sediment and 1.2 L of sterilised artificial lake water at one of ten nutrient levels of 0, 0.45, 1.80, 4.05, 7.65, 11.25, 15.75, 21.60, 28.80 and 36.00 mg N L−1 of KNO3 in the overlying water. To compensate for nitrate additions shifting stoichiometric ratios, KH2PO4 was added to the bottles so that the N/P ratio of the initial overlying water was 14.93, which was similar to the annual average ratio in Taihu Lake during 2007 (that is, 14.49). Thus, we use “nutrient enrichment” to indicate a series of targeted nutrient levels of both nitrate and phosphate, the former of which was used to represent nutrient enrichment in the statistical analyses. Each nutrient level was replicated three times. The lake sediments were obtained from the centre of Taihu Lake, China, and were aseptically canned per bottle after autoclaving at 121 °C for 30 min. Nutrient levels for the experiments were selected based on conditions of the eutrophic Taihu Lake, and the highest nitrate concentration was based on the maximum total nitrogen in 2007 (20.79 mg L−1; Fig. S19). We chose the nutrient level of this year because a massive cyanobacteria bloom in Taihu Lake happened in May 2007 and initiated an odorous drinking water crisis in the nearby city of Wuxi.The microcosms were left in the field for one month allowing airborne bacteria to freely colonise the sediments and water. To keep the microbial dispersal events as natural as possible, we did not cover the experimental microcosms in case of rainfall. To avoid or minimize potential influence of extreme nature events, we (i) left the top 20% of each microcosm empty to prevent water from overflowing during heavy rains, and (ii) checked the experimental sites twice during each experimental period, and added sterilized water to obtain a final volume of approximately 1.2 L. The bottom of our microcosm was buried into the local soils by 10% of the bottle height, partly to reduce UV exposure to sediments. More considerations of the experimental design were detailed in the Supplementary Methods. To avoid the effects of daily temperature variation, we measured the water temperature and pH within 2 h before noon at all elevations in the day before the final sample collection. At the end of the experimental period, we aseptically sampled the water and sediments of the 300 bottles (that is, 2 mountains × 5 elevations × 10 nutrient levels × 3 replicates) for the following analyses of physiochemical variables, bacterial community and DOM composition.Physiochemical variables and bacterial communityWe measured environmental variables, namely, the total nitrogen (TN), total phosphorus (TP), dissolved nutrients (that is, NOx−, NO2−, NH4+ and PO43−), total organic carbon (TOC), dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and chlorophyll a (Chl a) in the sediments, and the NO3−, NO2−, NH4+, PO43− and pH in the overlying water (Table S2, Fig. S20), according to Wang et al.29.The sediment bacteria were examined using high-throughput sequencing of 16S rRNA genes. The sequences were processed in QIIME (v1.9)45 and OTUs were defined at 97% sequence similarity. The bacterial sequences were rarefied to 20,000 per sample. Further details on physicochemical and bacterial community analyses are available in Wang et al.29.ESI FT-ICR MS analysis of DOM samplesHighly accurate mass measurements of DOM within the sediment samples were conducted using a 15 Tesla solariX XR system, a ultrahigh-resolution Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometer (FT-ICR MS, Bruker Daltonics, Billerica, MA) coupled with an electrospray ionization (ESI) interface, as demonstrated previously46 with some modifications. It should be noted that FT-ICR MS does not identify molecules, but only molecular formulae in terms of elemental composition and there can be many molecular structures sharing the same elemental compositions. DOM was solid-phase extracted (SPE) with Agilent VacElut resins before FT-ICR MS measurement47 with minor modifications. Briefly, an aliquot of 0.7 g freeze-dried sediment was sonicated with 30 ml ultrapure water for 2 h, and centrifuged at 5000 × g for 20 min. The extracted water was filtered through the 0.45 μm Millipore filter and further acidified to pH 2 using 1 M HCl. Cartridges were drained, rinsed with ultrapure water and methanol (ULC-MS grade), and conditioned with pH 2 ultrapure water. Calculated volumes of extracts were slowly passed through cartridges based on DOC concentration. Cartridges were rinsed with pH 2 ultrapure water and dried with N2 gas. Samples were finally eluted with methanol into precombusted amber glass vials, dried with N2 gas and stored at −20 °C until DOM analysis. The extracts were continuously injected into the standard ESI source with a flow rate of 2 μl min−1 and an ESI capillary voltage of 3.5 kV in negative ion mode. One hundred single scans with a transient size of 4 mega word (MW) data points, an ion accumulation time of 0.3 s, and within the mass range of m/z 150–1200, were co-added to a spectrum with absorption mode for phase correction, thereby resulting in a resolving power of 750,000 (FWHM at m/z 400). All FT-ICR mass spectra were internally calibrated using organic matter homologous series separated by 14 Da (-CH2 groups). The mass measurement accuracy was typically within 1 ppm for singly charged ions across a broad m/z range (150–1200 m/z).Data Analysis software (BrukerDaltonik v4.2) was used to convert raw spectra to a list of m/z values using FT-MS peak picker with a signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) threshold set to 7 and absolute intensity threshold to the default value of 100. Putative chemical formulae were assigned using the software Formularity (v1.0)48 following the Compound Identification Algorithm49. In total, 19,538 molecular formulas were putatively assigned for all samples (n = 300) based on the following criteria: S/N > 7, and mass measurement error 0.80, P ≤ 0.001; Fig. S9). Similar conclusions were also obtained with either OTUs or genera when relating the pairwise distances of molecular traits with SparCC correlation coefficient ρ values among DOM molecules in Fig. 4c. To reduce type I errors in the correlation calculations created by low-occurrence genera or molecules, the majority rule was applied; that is, we retained genera or molecules that were observed in more than half of the total samples (≥75 samples) in China or Norway. The filtered table, including 1340 and 1246 DOM molecules, and 75 and 49 bacterial genera in China and Norway, respectively, was then used for pairwise correlation calculation of DOM and bacteria using SparCC with default parameters35.Finally, bipartite network analysis at a molecular level was performed to quantify the specialization of DOM-bacteria networks (Box 1). The specialization considers interaction abundance and is standardised to account for heterogeneity in the interaction strength and species richness, which describes the levels of “vulnerability” of DOM molecules and “generality” of bacterial taxa27. The threshold correlation for inclusion in bipartite networks was |ρ| = 0.30 to exclude weak interactions and we retained the adjacent matrix with only the interactions between DOM and bacteria. We then constructed two types of interaction networks (i.e., negative and positive networks) based on negative and positive correlation coefficients (SparCC ρ ≤ −0.30 and ρ ≥ 0.30, respectively). According to resource-consumer relationships, negative networks likely indicate the degradation of larger molecules into smaller structures, while positive networks may suggest the production of new molecules via degradation or biosynthetic processes. The SparCC ρ values were multiplied by 10,000 and rounded to integers, and the absolute values were taken for negative networks to enable the calculations of specialization indices. A separate negative and positive sub-network was obtained for each microcosm by selecting the DOM molecules and bacterial taxa in each sample based on its bacterial and DOM compositions. For the network level analysis, we calculated H2′, a measure of specialization27, for each network:$${H}_{2}=-mathop{sum }limits_{i{{mbox{=}}}1}^{i}mathop{sum }limits_{j{{mbox{=}}}1}^{j}{{mbox{(}}}{{{mbox{p}}}}_{{ij}}{{{{{{rm{ln}}}}}}}{{{mbox{p}}}}_{{ij}}{{mbox{)}}}$$
(2)
$${H}_{2}{prime} =frac{{H}_{2{max }}{-}{H}_{2}}{{H}_{2{max }}{-}{H}_{2{min }}}$$
(3)
where ({{{mbox{p}}}}_{{ij}}{{mbox{=}}}{{{mbox{a}}}}_{{ij}}{{mbox{/}}}m), represents the proportion of interactions in a i × j matrix. ({{{mbox{a}}}}_{{ij}}) is the number of interactions between DOM molecule i and bacterial genus j, which is also referred as “link weight”. m is the total number of interactions between all DOM molecules and bacterial genera. H2′ is the standardised H2 against the minimum (H2min) and maximum (H2max) possible for the same distribution of interaction totals. For the molecular level analysis, we calculated the specialization index Kullback–Leibler distance (d′) for DOM molecules (di′) and bacterial genera (dj′), which describes the levels of “vulnerability” of DOM molecules and “generality” of bacterial genera, respectively:$${d}_{i}=mathop{sum }limits_{j=1}^{j}left(frac{{{{mbox{a}}}}_{{ij}}}{{{{mbox{A}}}}_{i}}{{{mbox{ln}}}}frac{{{{mbox{a}}}}_{{ij}}m}{{{{mbox{A}}}}_{i}{{{mbox{A}}}}_{j}}right)$$
(4)
$${d}_{i}{prime} =frac{{d}_{i}-{d}_{{min }}}{{d}_{{max }}-{d}_{{min }}}$$
(5)
where ({A}_{i}) = (mathop{sum }limits_{j{{mbox{=}}}1}^{j}{{{mbox{a}}}}_{{ij}}) and ({A}_{j}) = (mathop{sum }limits_{i{{mbox{=}}}1}^{i}{{{mbox{a}}}}_{{ij}}), are the total number of interactions of DOM molecule i and bacterial genus j, respectively. di′ is the standardised di against the minimum (dmin) and maximum (dmax) possible for the same distribution of interaction totals. The equations of dj′ are analogous to di′, replacing j by i. Weighted means of d′ for DOM were calculated for each network as the sum of the product of d′ for each individual molecule i (di′) and relative intensity Ii divided by the sum of all intensities d′ = Ʃ(di′ × Ii)/Ʃ(Ii). Weighted means of d′ for bacteria were calculated as the sum of the d′ of each individual bacterial genus j (dj′) and relative abundance of bacterial genus Ij divided by the sum of all abundance. All calculations were performed using the R package FD V1.0.12. The observed H2′ and d′ values ranged from 0 (complete generalization) to 1 (complete specialization)28 (Fig. S21). Specifically, elevated H2′ or d′ values indicate a high degree of specialization, while lower values suggest increased generalization, that is, higher vulnerability of DOM and/or higher generality of microbes. To directly compare the network indices across the elevations or nutrient enrichment levels, we used a null modelling approach. We standardised the three observed specialization indices (Sobserved; that is, H2′, d′ of DOM, and d′ of bacteria) by calculating their z-scores63 using the equation:$${z}_{S}=({S}_{{{{{{rm{observed}}}}}}}-overline{{{S}}_{{{{{{rm{null}}}}}}}})/({sigma }_{S_{{{{{rm{null}}}}}}})$$
(6)
where (overline{{{S}}_{{{{{{rm{null}}}}}}}}) and ({sigma }_{S_{{{{{rm{null}}}}}}}) were, respectively, the mean and standard deviation of the null distribution of S (Snull). One hundred randomised null networks were generated for each bipartite network to derive Snull using the swap.web algorithm, which keeps species richness and the number of interactions per species constant along with network connectance. This null model analysis indicates that interactions between DOM and bacteria were non-random as the observed network specialization indices were generally significantly lower than expected by chance (P 0.05), which tests whether the model structure differs from the observed data, high comparative fit index (CFI > 0.95) and low standardised root mean squared residual (SRMR More
