🚨Fresh out of press! How do wild bacterial communities respond to environmental perturbations like liming? We experimentally evolved them to find out! academic.oup.com/ismej/articl...

In this work, we present eco-evolutionary response of wild bacterial communities to experimental perturbation by liming wild decomposer communities living in beech tree-holes that 1) demonstrates extreme robustness of the bacterial communities to increased pH;

2) shows significant alterations in species diversity and composition in limed tree-holes; and 3) empirically shows genetic changes in the frequency of single nucleotide polymorphisms in MAGs that occurred at rates comparable to and correlated with ecological changes in the same MAGs.

To the best of our knowledge this is a rare example of applying perturbations as used in experimental evolution in laboratory studies but to wild bacterial communities.