Parallel changes in the taxonomical structure of bacterial communities exposed to a similar environmental disturbance

Abstract

Bacterial communities play a central role in ecosystems, by regulating biogeochemical fluxes. Therefore, understanding how multiple functional interactions between species face environmental perturbations is a major concern in conservation biology. Because bacteria can use several strategies, including horizontal gene transfers (HGT), to cope with rapidly changing environmental conditions, potential decoupling between function and taxonomy makes the use of a given species as a general bioindicator problematic. The present work is a first step to characterize the impact of a recent polymetallic gradient over the taxonomical networks of five lacustrine bacterial communities. Given that evolutionary convergence represents one of the best illustration of natural selection, we focused on a system composed of two pairs of impacted and clean lakes in order to test whether similar perturbation exerts a comparable impact on the taxonomical networks of independent bacterial communities. First, we showed that similar environmental stress drove parallel structural changes at the taxonomic level on two independent bacterial communities. Second, we showed that a long-term exposure to contaminant gradients drove significant taxonomic structure changes within three interconnected bacterial communities. Thus, this model lake system is relevant to characterize the strategies, namely acclimation and/or adaptation, of bacterial communities facing environmental perturbations, such as metal contamination.