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Title: The ecological assembly of bacterial communities in Antarctic wetlands varies across levels of phylogenetic resolution

Journal Article · · Environmental Microbiology
ORCiD logo [1]; ORCiD logo [2];  [3];  [3];  [4];  [5]
  1. Instituto Tecnológico de Chascomús (INTECH, UNSAM – CONICET) Chascomús Argentina
  2. Instituto de Recursos Naturales y Agrobiología de Salamanca (IRNASA‐CSIC) Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas Salamanca Spain
  3. Instituto de Investigación e Ingeniería Ambiental (IIIA, UNSAM‐CONICET), San Martín Buenos Aires Argentina
  4. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Ecosystem Science Team Richland WA
  5. Centre for Microbial Ecology and Genomics (CMEG), Department of Biochemistry, Genetics and Microbiology University of Pretoria Pretoria South Africa

Summary As functional traits are conserved at different phylogenetic depths, the ability to detect community assembly processes can be conditional on the phylogenetic resolution; yet most previous work quantifying their influence has focused on a single level of phylogenetic resolution. Here, we have studied the ecological assembly of bacterial communities from an Antarctic wetland complex, applying null models across different levels of phylogenetic resolution (i.e. clustering ASVs into OTUs with decreasing sequence identity thresholds). We found that the relative influence of the community assembly processes varies with phylogenetic resolution. More specifically, selection processes seem to impose stronger influence at finer (100% sequence similarity ASV) than at coarser (99%–97% sequence similarity OTUs) resolution. We identified environmental features related with the ecological processes and propose a conceptual model for the bacterial community assembly in this Antarctic ecosystem. Briefly, eco‐evolutionary processes appear to be leading to different but very closely related ASVs in lotic, lentic and terrestrial environments. In all, this study shows that assessing community assembly processes at different phylogenetic resolutions is key to improve our understanding of microbial ecology. More importantly, a failure to detect selection processes at coarser phylogenetic resolution does not imply the absence of such processes at finer resolutions.

Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
Grant/Contract Number:
DE‐AC05‐76RL01830
OSTI ID:
1868396
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 1842875
Journal Information:
Environmental Microbiology, Journal Name: Environmental Microbiology Vol. 24 Journal Issue: 8; ISSN 1462-2912
Publisher:
Wiley-BlackwellCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United Kingdom
Language:
English

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