Abstract
Although protists (microbial eukaryotes) provide an important link between bacteria and Metazoa in food webs, we do not yet have a clear understanding of the spatial scales on which protist diversity varies. Here, we use a combination of DNA fingerprinting (denaturant gradient gel electrophoresis or DGGE) and high-throughput sequencing (HTS) to assess the ciliate community in the class Spirotrichea at varying scales of 1–3 km sampled in three locations separated by at least 25 km—offshore, midshelf and inshore—along the New England shelf. Analyses of both abundant community (DGGE) and the total community (HTS) members reveal that: 1) ciliate communities are patchily distributed inshore (i.e. the middle station of a transect is distinct from its two neighboring stations), whereas communities are more homogeneous among samples within the midshelf and offshore stations; 2) a ciliate closely related to Pelagostrobilidium paraepacrum ‘blooms’ inshore and; 3) environmental factors may differentially impact the distributions of individual ciliates (i.e. OTUs) rather than the community as a whole as OTUs tend to show distinct biogeographies (e.g. some OTUs are restricted to the offshore locations, some to the surface, etc.). Together, these data show the complexity underlying the spatial distributions of marine protists, and suggest that biogeography may be a property of ciliate species rather than communities.
Highlights
Microbial eukaryotes, or protists, play a critical role in plankton food webs by linking picoplankton and Metazoa [1,2,3])
The offshore stations show a slight increase in the number of phylotypes with depth, but overall the communities are similar throughout the water column (Fig 3)
Comparisons of high-throughput sequencing (HTS) and denaturant gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) data from samples taken at three locations off the New England coast lead to two main insights: 1) ciliate communities are patchily distributed on the shelf at scales of 1–3 km; and 2) ciliate communities and abundant OTUs do not share the same biogeographies
Summary
Protists, play a critical role in plankton food webs by linking picoplankton (bacteria, archaea and very small eukaryotes) and Metazoa (copepods and fish) [1,2,3]). Recent studies have analyzed broad patterns of protist diversity in the global ocean using high-throughput sequencing (HTS), and observed that pico- and nano-sized organisms (0.2– 20 μm in diameter) represent a large fraction of total plankton diversity, within the rare biosphere [4,5,6]. This explains some of our gaps in knowledge about planktonic diversity, given that morphological identification of these small taxa is difficult compared to that of larger species.
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