Dataset Information

Global patterns of bacterial beta-diversity in seafloor and seawater ecosystems.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Marine microbial communities have been essential contributors to global biomass, nutrient cycling, and biodiversity since the early history of Earth, but so far their community distribution patterns remain unknown in most marine ecosystems.

Methodology/principal findings

The synthesis of 9.6 million bacterial V6-rRNA amplicons for 509 samples that span the global ocean's surface to the deep-sea floor shows that pelagic and benthic communities greatly differ, at all taxonomic levels, and share <10% bacterial types defined at 3% sequence similarity level. Surface and deep water, coastal and open ocean, and anoxic and oxic ecosystems host distinct communities that reflect productivity, land influences and other environmental constraints such as oxygen availability. The high variability of bacterial community composition specific to vent and coastal ecosystems reflects the heterogeneity and dynamic nature of these habitats. Both pelagic and benthic bacterial community distributions correlate with surface water productivity, reflecting the coupling between both realms by particle export. Also, differences in physical mixing may play a fundamental role in the distribution patterns of marine bacteria, as benthic communities showed a higher dissimilarity with increasing distance than pelagic communities.

Conclusions/significance

This first synthesis of global bacterial distribution across different ecosystems of the World's oceans shows remarkable horizontal and vertical large-scale patterns in bacterial communities. This opens interesting perspectives for the definition of biogeographical biomes for bacteria of ocean waters and the seabed.

SUBMITTER: Zinger L

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3169623 | biostudies-literature | 2011

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Global patterns of bacterial beta-diversity in seafloor and seawater ecosystems.

Zinger Lucie L Amaral-Zettler Linda A LA Fuhrman Jed A JA Horner-Devine M Claire MC Huse Susan M SM Welch David B Mark DB Martiny Jennifer B H JB Sogin Mitchell M Boetius Antje A Ramette Alban A

PloS one 20110908 9

<h4>Background</h4>Marine microbial communities have been essential contributors to global biomass, nutrient cycling, and biodiversity since the early history of Earth, but so far their community distribution patterns remain unknown in most marine ecosystems.<h4>Methodology/principal findings</h4>The synthesis of 9.6 million bacterial V6-rRNA amplicons for 509 samples that span the global ocean's surface to the deep-sea floor shows that pelagic and benthic communities greatly differ, at all taxo ...[more]

PMID: 21931760

Similar Datasets

Project description:Increasing evidence has emerged for non-random spatial distributions of microbes, but knowledge of the processes that cause variation in microbial assemblage among ecosystems is lacking. For instance, some studies showed that deterministic processes such as habitat specialization are important, while other studies hold that bacterial communities are assembled by stochastic forces. Here we examine the relative influence of deterministic and stochastic processes for bacterial communities from subsurface environments, stream biofilm, lake water, lake sediment and soil using pyrosequencing of the 16S ribosomal RNA gene. We show that there is a general pattern in phylogenetic signal in species ecological niches across recent evolutionary time for all studied habitats, enabling us to infer the influences of community assembly processes from patterns of phylogenetic turnover in community composition. The phylogenetic dissimilarities among-habitat types were significantly higher than within them, and the communities were clustered according to their original habitat types. For communities within-habitat types, the highest phylogenetic turnover rate through space was observed in subsurface environments, followed by stream biofilm on mountainsides, whereas the sediment assemblages across regional scales showed the lowest turnover rate. Quantifying phylogenetic turnover as the deviation from a null expectation suggested that measured environmental variables imposed strong selection on bacterial communities for nearly all sample groups. For three sample groups, spatial distance reflected unmeasured environmental variables that impose selection, as opposed to spatial isolation. Such characterization of spatial and environmental variables proved essential for proper interpretation of partial Mantel results based on observed beta diversity metrics. In summary, our results clearly indicate a dominant role of deterministic processes on bacterial assemblages and highlight that bacteria show strong habitat associations that have likely emerged through evolutionary adaptation.

Dataset Information

Global patterns of bacterial beta-diversity in seafloor and seawater ecosystems.

Background

Methodology/principal findings

Conclusions/significance

Publications

Global patterns of bacterial beta-diversity in seafloor and seawater ecosystems.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets