ORCID Profile
0000-0003-1893-0575
Current Organisations
Swiss Federal Research Institute for forest snow and landscape (WSL)
,
University of Pretoria
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Publisher: Wiley
Date: 10-07-2023
DOI: 10.1111/ECOG.06568
Abstract: The majority of islands surrounding the Antarctic continent are poorly characterized in terms of microbial macroecology due to their remote locations, geographical isolation and access difficulties. The 2016/2017 Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition (ACE) provided unprecedented access to a number of these islands. In the present study we use metagenomic methods to investigate the microbial ecology of soil s les recovered from 11 circum‐Antarctic islands as part of ACE, and to investigate the functional potential of their soil microbial communities. Comparisons of the prokaryote and lower eukaryote phylogenetic compositions of the soil communities indicated that the various islands harbored spatially distinct microbiomes with limited overlap. In particular, we identified a high prevalence of lichen‐associated fungal taxa in the soils, suggesting that terrestrial lichens may be one of the key drivers of soil microbial ecology on these islands. Differential abundance and redundancy analyses suggested that these soil microbial communities are also strongly shaped by multiple abiotic factors, including soil pH and average annual temperatures. Most importantly, we demonstrate that the islands s led in this study can be clustered into three distinct large‐scale biogeographical regions in a conservation context, the sub‐, Maritime and Continental Antarctic, which are distinct in both environmental conditions and microbial ecology, but are consistent with the widely‐used regionalization applied to multicellular Antarctic terrestrial organisms. Functional profiling of the island soil metagenomes from these three broad biogeographical regions also suggested a degree of functional differentiation, reflecting their distinct microbial ecologies. Taken together, these results represent the most extensive characterization of the microbial ecology of Antarctic island soils to date.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 21-02-2023
Abstract: 16S rRNA gene licon sequencing is routinely used in environmental surveys to identify microbial ersity and composition of the s les of interest. The dominant sequencing technology of the past decade (Illumina) is based on the sequencing of 16S rRNA hypervariable regions. Online sequence data repositories, which represent an invaluable resource for investigating microbial distributional patterns across spatial, environmental or temporal scales, contain licon datasets from erse 16S rRNA gene variable regions. However, the utility of these sequence datasets is potentially reduced by the use of different 16S rRNA gene lified regions. By comparing 10 Antarctic soil s les sequenced for five different 16S rRNA licons, we explore whether sequence data derived from erse 16S rRNA variable regions can be validly used as a resource for biogeographical studies. Patterns of shared and unique taxa differed among s les as a result of variable taxonomic resolutions of the assessed 16S rRNA variable regions. However, our analyses also suggest that the use of multi‐primer datasets for biogeographical studies of the domain Bacteria is a valid approach to explore bacterial biogeographical patterns due to the preservation of bacterial taxonomic and ersity patterns across different variable region datasets. We deem composite datasets useful for biogeographical studies.
Location: Switzerland
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
No related grants have been discovered for Gilda Varliero.