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Distribution Patterns of Benthic Protist Communities Depending on Depth Revealed by Environmental Sequencing—From the Sublittoral to the Deep Sea

Protists are key components of the microbial food web in marine pelagic systems because they link algal and bacterial production to higher trophic levels. However, their functioning and bathymetric distribution in benthic deep-sea ecosystems are still only poorly understood. However, biogeographical...

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Autores principales: Dünn, Manon, Arndt, Hartmut
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10385078/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37512837
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/microorganisms11071664
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author Dünn, Manon
Arndt, Hartmut
author_facet Dünn, Manon
Arndt, Hartmut
author_sort Dünn, Manon
collection PubMed
description Protists are key components of the microbial food web in marine pelagic systems because they link algal and bacterial production to higher trophic levels. However, their functioning and bathymetric distribution in benthic deep-sea ecosystems are still only poorly understood. However, biogeographical patterns of communities can be coupled to the functioning of ecosystems and are therefore important to understand ecological and evolutionary processes. In this study, we investigated the diversity and distribution of benthic protist communities from the sublittoral down to the deep seafloor (50–2000 m) around three islands of the Azores in the North Atlantic Ocean. Using amplicon sequencing of the V9 region (18S rDNA) of 21 samples, we found that protist community compositions from different depths were significantly different. Three assemblages were separated along the following depths: 50 m, 150–500 m and 1000–2000 m, which indicate that deep-sea areas surrounding islands might act as isolating barriers for benthic protist species. A limited gene flow between the communities could favor speciation processes, leading to the unique protist communities found at the different investigated islands.
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spelling pubmed-103850782023-07-30 Distribution Patterns of Benthic Protist Communities Depending on Depth Revealed by Environmental Sequencing—From the Sublittoral to the Deep Sea Dünn, Manon Arndt, Hartmut Microorganisms Article Protists are key components of the microbial food web in marine pelagic systems because they link algal and bacterial production to higher trophic levels. However, their functioning and bathymetric distribution in benthic deep-sea ecosystems are still only poorly understood. However, biogeographical patterns of communities can be coupled to the functioning of ecosystems and are therefore important to understand ecological and evolutionary processes. In this study, we investigated the diversity and distribution of benthic protist communities from the sublittoral down to the deep seafloor (50–2000 m) around three islands of the Azores in the North Atlantic Ocean. Using amplicon sequencing of the V9 region (18S rDNA) of 21 samples, we found that protist community compositions from different depths were significantly different. Three assemblages were separated along the following depths: 50 m, 150–500 m and 1000–2000 m, which indicate that deep-sea areas surrounding islands might act as isolating barriers for benthic protist species. A limited gene flow between the communities could favor speciation processes, leading to the unique protist communities found at the different investigated islands. MDPI 2023-06-26 /pmc/articles/PMC10385078/ /pubmed/37512837 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/microorganisms11071664 Text en © 2023 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Dünn, Manon
Arndt, Hartmut
Distribution Patterns of Benthic Protist Communities Depending on Depth Revealed by Environmental Sequencing—From the Sublittoral to the Deep Sea
title Distribution Patterns of Benthic Protist Communities Depending on Depth Revealed by Environmental Sequencing—From the Sublittoral to the Deep Sea
title_full Distribution Patterns of Benthic Protist Communities Depending on Depth Revealed by Environmental Sequencing—From the Sublittoral to the Deep Sea
title_fullStr Distribution Patterns of Benthic Protist Communities Depending on Depth Revealed by Environmental Sequencing—From the Sublittoral to the Deep Sea
title_full_unstemmed Distribution Patterns of Benthic Protist Communities Depending on Depth Revealed by Environmental Sequencing—From the Sublittoral to the Deep Sea
title_short Distribution Patterns of Benthic Protist Communities Depending on Depth Revealed by Environmental Sequencing—From the Sublittoral to the Deep Sea
title_sort distribution patterns of benthic protist communities depending on depth revealed by environmental sequencing—from the sublittoral to the deep sea
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10385078/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37512837
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/microorganisms11071664
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