Endemic hydrothermal vent species identified in the open ocean seed bank

Abstract

Hydrothermal vent systems host microbial communities among which several microorganisms have been considered endemic to this type of habitat. It is still unclear how these organisms colonize geographically distant hydrothermal environments. Based on 16S rRNA gene sequences, we compare the bacterial communities of sixteen Atlantic hydrothermal vent samples with our own and publicly available global open ocean samples. Analysing sequences obtained from 63 million 16S rRNA genes, the genera we could identify in the open ocean waters contained 99.9% of the vent reads. This suggests that previously observed vent exclusiveness is, in most cases, probably an artefact of lower sequencing depth. These findings are a further step towards elucidating the role of the open ocean as a seed bank. They can explain the predicament of how species expected to be endemic to vent systems are able to colonize geographically distant hydrothermal habitats and contribute to our understanding of whether 'everything is really everywhere'.