Abstract
Understanding microbial niche variability in polar regions can provide insights into the adaptive diversification of microbial lineages in extreme environments. Compositions of microbial communities in Arctic soils are well documented but a comprehensive multidomain diversity assessment of rocks remains insufficiently studied. In this study, we obtained two types of rocks (sandstone and limestone) and soils around the rocks in a high Arctic polar desert (Svalbard), and examined the compositions of archaeal, bacterial, fungal, and protistan communities in the rocks and soils. The microbial community structure differed significantly between rocks and soils across all microbial groups at higher taxonomic levels, indicating that Acidobacteria, Gemmatimonadetes, Latescibacteria, Rokubacteria, Leotiomycetes, Pezizomycetes, Mortierellomycetes, Sarcomonadea, and Spirotrichea were more abundant in soils, whereas Cyanobacteria, Deinococcus-Thermus, FBP, Lecanoromycetes, Eurotiomycetes, Trebouxiophyceae, and Ulvophyceae were more abundant in rocks. Interestingly, fungal communities differed markedly between two different rock types, which is likely to be ascribed to the predominance of distinct lichen-forming fungal taxa (Verrucariales in limestone, and Lecanorales in sandstone). This suggests that the physical or chemical properties of rocks could be a major determinant in the successful establishment of lichens in lithic environments. Furthermore, the biotic interactions among microorganisms based on co-occurrence network analysis revealed that Polyblastia and Verrucaria in limestone, and Atla, Porpidia, and Candelariella in sandstone play an important role as keystone taxa in the lithic communities. Our study shows that even in niches with the same climate regime and proximity to each other, heterogeneity of edaphic and lithic niches can affect microbial community assembly, which could be helpful in comprehensively understanding the effects of niche on microbial assembly in Arctic terrestrial ecosystems.
Highlights
Understanding the microbial community structure and diversity in polar regions is fundamentally important in both microbial ecology and evolution (Allen and Banfield, 2005)
Microclimatic parameters such as relative humidity, photosynthetically active radiation (PAR), and air temperature were recorded for 12 months, from August 2015, at close proximity to the sampling site (Figure 1C)
We showed that the community structure of four taxonomic groups differed significantly between rocks and soils
Summary
Understanding the microbial community structure and diversity in polar regions is fundamentally important in both microbial ecology and evolution (Allen and Banfield, 2005). In the case of high Arctic regions, the distribution pattern and function of edaphic microbial communities have been extensively documented (Kastovska et al, 2005; Schutte et al, 2009; Wilhelm et al, 2011; Tveit et al, 2013; Blaud et al, 2015; McCann et al, 2016), few studies have investigated lithic microbial communities, and these have mainly focused on bacteria and/or fungi (Omelon et al, 2006, 2007; Omelon, 2008; Ziolkowski et al, 2013; Choe et al, 2018). There have been few comprehensive multidomain biodiversity assessments on polar regions (Pointing et al, 2009; Garrido-Benavent et al, 2020), and variations in the microbial diversity between different niches (rocks and soils) are still poorly understood
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