Predictability of the community‐function landscape in wine yeast ecosystems

Abstract

Predictively linking taxonomic composition and quantitative ecosystem functions is a major aspiration in microbial ecology, which must be resolved if we wish to engineer microbial consortia. Here, we have addressed this open question for an ecological function of major biotechnological relevance: alcoholic fermentation in wine yeast communities. By exhaustively phenotyping an extensive collection of naturally occurring wine yeast strains, we find that most ecologically and industrially relevant traits exhibit phylogenetic signal, allowing functional traits in wine yeast communities to be predicted from taxonomy. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the quantitative contributions of individual wine yeast strains to the function of complex communities followed simple quantitative rules. These regularities can be integrated to quantitatively predict the function of newly assembled consortia. Besides addressing theoretical questions in functional ecology, our results and methodologies can provide a blueprint for rationally managing microbial processes of biotechnological relevance. image Exploring the connection between taxonomic composition and ecological function is a primary objective in engineering microbial consortia. Here, this link is investigated within the context of a highly relevant biotechnological process: wine fermentation. In‐depth phenotyping of a collection of wine yeast isolates indicates that most of the analysed traits exhibit a phylogenetic signal, enabling the prediction of functional traits based on phylogeny. The contributions of individual wine yeasts to the function of wine fermentation in various community contexts follow simple quantitative rules. Understanding individual species behaviours in different ecological contexts enables us to anticipate the function of any randomly assembled complex community.