Spatial variations in microbial community and possible dispersal vectors of microbes in nature

Dr. Masayuki Ushio

Microbial communities drive ecosystem processes. Studies showed that the composition of the microbial community significantly influences functions of the microbial community. Therefore, microbial ecologists are recently more focusing on how the composition of the microbial community is determined in nature. In this seminar, I will briefly review literatures that investigated spatial variations in the microbial community composition and environmental factors that contribute to the variations. Then, I show results of some studies I have conducted for these three years to evaluate the spatial variations and their possible determinants. Keywords of this seminar are: soil microbial community, spatial variation, CARD-FISH, high-throughput sequencing, dispersal vectors. If time is　available, I will briefly introduce a very different topic that I am recently working on.