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Phylogenetic and ecological diversity of apusomonads, a lineage of deep-branching eukaryotes.

ABSTRACT: Apusomonads are a mysterious group of heterotrophic gliding biflagellates branching deeply in the eukaryotic tree of life as sister group to opisthokonts (including animals, fungi, and a variety of unicellular protists). Despite their evolutionary interest, their diversity and ecology remain largely unknown, with very few described species and environmental sequences in databases. Most environmental 18S rRNA gene-based studies generally fail to identify apusomonad sequences, which might be due to primer bias, low abundance, and/or to the fact that their biotopes remain poorly explored. We have carried out an extensive search of 18S rRNA genes using an apusomonad-specific primer in a wide variety of ecosystems. Our study significantly broadens the diversity of apusomonads showing that, despite being mostly rare protists, they often dwell in freshwater and marine benthic environments, generally associated with low-oxygen concentrations. Apusomonads have been identified in environments across a wide salinity range. Some operational taxonomic units (OTUs), occurring in both marine and freshwater ecosystems, seem truly euryhaline, indicating that members of this deep-branching lineage easily cross such ecological barriers.

SUBMITTER: Torruella G

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5551962 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Phylogenetic and ecological diversity of apusomonads, a lineage of deep-branching eukaryotes.

Torruella Guifré G Moreira David D López-García Purificación P

Environmental microbiology reports 20170125 2

Apusomonads are a mysterious group of heterotrophic gliding biflagellates branching deeply in the eukaryotic tree of life as sister group to opisthokonts (including animals, fungi, and a variety of unicellular protists). Despite their evolutionary interest, their diversity and ecology remain largely unknown, with very few described species and environmental sequences in databases. Most environmental 18S rRNA gene-based studies generally fail to identify apusomonad sequences, which might be due t ...[more]

PMID: 27894159

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Project description:Understanding the influences of dispersal limitation and environmental filtering on the structure of ecological communities is a major challenge in ecology. Insight may be gained by combining phylogenetic, functional and taxonomic data to characterize spatial turnover in community structure (?-diversity). We develop a framework that allows rigorous inference of the strengths of dispersal limitation and environmental filtering by combining these three types of ?-diversity. Our framework provides model-generated expectations for patterns of taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional ?-diversity across biologically relevant combinations of dispersal limitation and environmental filtering. After developing the framework we compared the model-generated expectations to the commonly used "intuitive" expectation that the variance explained by the environment or by space will, respectively, increase monotonically with the strength of environmental filtering or dispersal limitation. The model-generated expectations strongly departed from these intuitive expectations: the variance explained by the environment or by space was often a unimodal function of the strength of environmental filtering or dispersal limitation, respectively. Therefore, although it is commonly done in the literature, one cannot assume that the strength of an underlying process is a monotonic function of explained variance. To infer the strength of underlying processes, one must instead compare explained variances to model-generated expectations. Our framework provides these expectations. We show that by combining the three types of ?-diversity with model-generated expectations our framework is able to provide rigorous inferences of the relative and absolute strengths of dispersal limitation and environmental filtering. Phylogenetic, functional and taxonomic ?-diversity can therefore be used simultaneously to infer processes by comparing their empirical patterns to the expectations generated by frameworks similar to the one developed here.

Dataset Information

Phylogenetic and ecological diversity of apusomonads, a lineage of deep-branching eukaryotes.

Publications

Phylogenetic and ecological diversity of apusomonads, a lineage of deep-branching eukaryotes.

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