Response of the rare biosphere to environmental disturbance in a highly diverse ecosystem (Zodletone spring, OK, USA)
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Ecology, Microbiology
- Keywords
- Rare biosphere dynamics, backup system, environmental disturbances, Zodletone spring
- Copyright
- © 2015 Coveley et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2015. Response of the rare biosphere to environmental disturbance in a highly diverse ecosystem (Zodletone spring, OK, USA) PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1078v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1078v1
Abstract
Within highly diverse ecosystems, the majority of bacterial taxa are present in low abundance as members of the rare biosphere. The rationale for the occurrence and maintenance of the rare biosphere, and the putative ecological role(s) and dynamics of its members within a specific ecosystem is currently debated. We hypothesized that in highly diverse ecosystems, a fraction of the rare biosphere acts as a backup system that readily responds to environmental disturbances. We tested this hypothesis by subjecting sediments from Zodletone spring, a sulfide- and sulfur-rich spring in southwestern OK, to incremental levels of salinity (1, 2, 3, 4, and 10% NaCl), or temperature (280, 300, 320, and 700C), and traced the trajectories of rare members of the community in response to these manipulations using 16S rRNA gene analysis. Our results indicate that multiple rare bacterial taxa are promoted from rare to abundant members of the community following such manipulations and that, in general, the magnitude of such recruitment is directly proportional to the severity of the applied manipulation. Rare members that are phylogenetically distinct from abundant taxa in the original sample (unique rare biosphere) played a more important role in the microbial community response to environmental disturbances, compared to rare members that are phylogenetically similar to abundant taxa in the original sample (non-unique rare biosphere). The results emphasize the dynamic nature of the rare biosphere, and highlight its complexity and non-monolithic nature.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
Supplemental Information
Table S1
Percentage abundances based on the number of sequences in each treatment condition that were affiliated with phyla in the first column. Unclassified bin denotes the number of sequences that were < 85% to any Greengenes database classified entry. Classification was done using the PyNAST pipeline