Padrões de grande escala na biodiversidade de eucariotos microbianos do fundo do mar abissal

Large-scale patterns in biodiversity of microbial eukaryotes from the abyssal sea floor

Frank Scheckenbacha,1, Klaus Hausmannb, Claudia Wylezicha,c, Markus Weiterea and Hartmut Arndta

- Author Affiliations

aDepartment of General Ecology and Limnology, Institute for Zoology, Biocenter, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany;

bDivision of Protozoology, Institute of Biology/Zoology, Free University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany; and

cDepartment of Biological Oceanography, Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research, Warnemünde, Germany

Edited by David M. Karl, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI, and approved November 4, 2009 (recieved for review August 6, 2009)

Abstract

Eukaryotic microbial life at abyssal depths remains “uncharted territory” in eukaryotic microbiology. No phylogenetic surveys have focused on the largest benthic environment on this planet, the abyssal plains. Moreover, knowledge of the spatial patterns of deep-sea community structure is scanty, and what little is known originates primarily from morphology-based studies of foraminiferans. Here we report on the great phylogenetic diversity of microbial eukaryotic communities of all 3 abyssal plains of the southeastern Atlantic Ocean---the Angola, Cape, and Guinea Abyssal Plains---from depths of 5,000 m. A high percentage of retrieved clones had no close representatives in genetic databases. Many clones were affiliated with parasitic species. Furthermore, differences between the communities of the Cape Abyssal Plain and the other 2 abyssal plains point to environmental gradients apparently shaping community structure at the landscape level. On a regional scale, local species diversity showed much less variation. Our study provides insight into the community composition of microbial eukaryotes on larger scales from the wide abyssal sea floor realm and marks a direction for more detailed future studies aimed at improving our understanding of deep-sea microbes at the community and ecosystem levels, as well as the ecological principles at play.

benthic clone library deep sea protists protozoa
Footnotes

1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: fschecke@uni-koeln.de.

Author contributions: F.S., C.W., and H.A. designed research; F.S. performed research; F.S. analyzed data; and F.S., K.H., C.W., M.W., and H.A. wrote the paper.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.

Data deposition: The sequences reported in this paper have been deposited in the GenBank database (accession nos. GU218701--GU219463).

This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/0908816106/DCSupplemental.

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