Dataset Information

Determining Microbial Roles in Ecosystem Function: Redefining Microbial Food Webs and Transcending Kingdom Barriers.

ABSTRACT: Microorganisms can have a profound and varying effect on the chemical character of environments and, thereby, ecological health. Their capacity to consume or transform contaminants leads to contrasting outcomes, such as the dissipation of nutrient pollution via denitrification, the breakdown of spilled oil, or eutrophication via primary producer overgrowth. Recovering the genomes of organisms directly from the environment is useful to gain insights into resource usage, interspecies collaborations (producers and consumers), and trait acquisition. Microbial data can also be considered alongside the broader biological character of an environment through the co-recovery of eukaryotic DNA. The contributions of individual microorganisms (bacteria, archaea, and protists) to snapshots of ecosystem processes can be determined by integrating genomics with functional methods. This combined approach enables a detailed understanding of how microbial communities drive biogeochemical cycles, and although currently limited by scale, key attributes can be effectively extrapolated with lower-resolution methods to determine wider ecological relevance.

SUBMITTER: Handley KM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6584882 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Determining Microbial Roles in Ecosystem Function: Redefining Microbial Food Webs and Transcending Kingdom Barriers.

Handley Kim M KM

mSystems 20190604 3

Microorganisms can have a profound and varying effect on the chemical character of environments and, thereby, ecological health. Their capacity to consume or transform contaminants leads to contrasting outcomes, such as the dissipation of nutrient pollution via denitrification, the breakdown of spilled oil, or eutrophication via primary producer overgrowth. Recovering the genomes of organisms directly from the environment is useful to gain insights into resource usage, interspecies collaboration ...[more]

PMID: 31164408

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Project description:Microbial communities in the coastal Arctic Ocean experience extreme variability in organic matter and inorganic nutrients driven by seasonal shifts in sea ice extent and freshwater inputs. Lagoons border more than half of the Beaufort Sea coast and provide important habitats for migratory fish and seabirds; yet, little is known about the planktonic food webs supporting these higher trophic levels. To investigate seasonal changes in bacterial and protistan planktonic communities, amplicon sequences of 16S and 18S rRNA genes were generated from samples collected during periods of ice-cover (April), ice break-up (June), and open water (August) from shallow lagoons along the eastern Alaska Beaufort Sea coast from 2011 through 2013. Protist communities shifted from heterotrophic to photosynthetic taxa (mainly diatoms) during the winter-spring transition, and then back to a heterotroph-dominated summer community that included dinoflagellates and mixotrophic picophytoplankton such as Micromonas and Bathycoccus. Planktonic parasites belonging to Syndiniales were abundant under ice in winter at a time when allochthonous carbon inputs were low. Bacterial communities shifted from coastal marine taxa (Oceanospirillaceae, Alteromonadales) to estuarine taxa (Polaromonas, Bacteroidetes) during the winter-spring transition, and then to oligotrophic marine taxa (SAR86, SAR92) in summer. Chemolithoautotrophic taxa were abundant under ice, including iron-oxidizing Zetaproteobacteria. These results suggest that wintertime Arctic bacterial communities capitalize on the unique biogeochemical gradients that develop below ice near shore, potentially using chemoautotrophic metabolisms at a time when carbon inputs to the system are low. Co-occurrence networks constructed for each season showed that under-ice networks were dominated by relationships between parasitic protists and other microbial taxa, while spring networks were by far the largest and dominated by bacteria-bacteria co-occurrences. Summer networks were the smallest and least connected, suggesting a more detritus-based food web less reliant on interactions among microbial taxa. Eukaryotic and bacterial community compositions were significantly related to trends in concentrations of stable isotopes of particulate organic carbon and nitrogen, among other physiochemical variables such as dissolved oxygen, salinity, and temperature. This suggests the importance of sea ice cover and terrestrial carbon subsidies in contributing to seasonal trends in microbial communities in the coastal Beaufort Sea.

Dataset Information

Determining Microbial Roles in Ecosystem Function: Redefining Microbial Food Webs and Transcending Kingdom Barriers.

Publications

Determining Microbial Roles in Ecosystem Function: Redefining Microbial Food Webs and Transcending Kingdom Barriers.

Similar Datasets

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