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Microbial Community Responses to Increased Water and Organic Matter in the Arid Soils of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica

The soils of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica are an extreme polar desert, inhabited exclusively by microscopic taxa. This region is on the threshold of anticipated climate change, with glacial melt, permafrost thaw, and the melting of massive buried ice increasing liquid water availability and m...

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Autores principales: Buelow, Heather N., Winter, Ara S., Van Horn, David J., Barrett, John E., Gooseff, Michael N., Schwartz, Egbert, Takacs-Vesbach, Cristina D.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4947590/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27486436
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2016.01040
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author Buelow, Heather N.
Winter, Ara S.
Van Horn, David J.
Barrett, John E.
Gooseff, Michael N.
Schwartz, Egbert
Takacs-Vesbach, Cristina D.
author_facet Buelow, Heather N.
Winter, Ara S.
Van Horn, David J.
Barrett, John E.
Gooseff, Michael N.
Schwartz, Egbert
Takacs-Vesbach, Cristina D.
author_sort Buelow, Heather N.
collection PubMed
description The soils of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica are an extreme polar desert, inhabited exclusively by microscopic taxa. This region is on the threshold of anticipated climate change, with glacial melt, permafrost thaw, and the melting of massive buried ice increasing liquid water availability and mobilizing soil nutrients. Experimental water and organic matter (OM) amendments were applied to investigate how these climate change effects may impact the soil communities. To identify active taxa and their functions, total community RNA transcripts were sequenced and annotated, and amended soils were compared with unamended control soils using differential abundance and expression analyses. Overall, taxonomic diversity declined with amendments of water and OM. The domain Bacteria increased with both amendments while Eukaryota declined from 38% of all taxa in control soils to 8 and 11% in water and OM amended soils, respectively. Among bacterial phyla, Actinobacteria (59%) dominated water-amended soils and Firmicutes (45%) dominated OM amended soils. Three bacterial phyla (Actinobacteria, Proteobacteria, and Firmicutes) were primarily responsible for the observed positive functional responses, while eukaryotic taxa experienced the majority (27 of 34) of significant transcript losses. These results indicated that as climate changes in this region, a replacement of endemic taxa adapted to dry, oligotrophic conditions by generalist, copiotrophic taxa is likely.
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spelling pubmed-49475902016-08-02 Microbial Community Responses to Increased Water and Organic Matter in the Arid Soils of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica Buelow, Heather N. Winter, Ara S. Van Horn, David J. Barrett, John E. Gooseff, Michael N. Schwartz, Egbert Takacs-Vesbach, Cristina D. Front Microbiol Microbiology The soils of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica are an extreme polar desert, inhabited exclusively by microscopic taxa. This region is on the threshold of anticipated climate change, with glacial melt, permafrost thaw, and the melting of massive buried ice increasing liquid water availability and mobilizing soil nutrients. Experimental water and organic matter (OM) amendments were applied to investigate how these climate change effects may impact the soil communities. To identify active taxa and their functions, total community RNA transcripts were sequenced and annotated, and amended soils were compared with unamended control soils using differential abundance and expression analyses. Overall, taxonomic diversity declined with amendments of water and OM. The domain Bacteria increased with both amendments while Eukaryota declined from 38% of all taxa in control soils to 8 and 11% in water and OM amended soils, respectively. Among bacterial phyla, Actinobacteria (59%) dominated water-amended soils and Firmicutes (45%) dominated OM amended soils. Three bacterial phyla (Actinobacteria, Proteobacteria, and Firmicutes) were primarily responsible for the observed positive functional responses, while eukaryotic taxa experienced the majority (27 of 34) of significant transcript losses. These results indicated that as climate changes in this region, a replacement of endemic taxa adapted to dry, oligotrophic conditions by generalist, copiotrophic taxa is likely. Frontiers Media S.A. 2016-07-18 /pmc/articles/PMC4947590/ /pubmed/27486436 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2016.01040 Text en Copyright © 2016 Buelow, Winter, Van Horn, Barrett, Gooseff, Schwartz and Takacs-Vesbach. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Microbiology
Buelow, Heather N.
Winter, Ara S.
Van Horn, David J.
Barrett, John E.
Gooseff, Michael N.
Schwartz, Egbert
Takacs-Vesbach, Cristina D.
Microbial Community Responses to Increased Water and Organic Matter in the Arid Soils of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica
title Microbial Community Responses to Increased Water and Organic Matter in the Arid Soils of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica
title_full Microbial Community Responses to Increased Water and Organic Matter in the Arid Soils of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica
title_fullStr Microbial Community Responses to Increased Water and Organic Matter in the Arid Soils of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica
title_full_unstemmed Microbial Community Responses to Increased Water and Organic Matter in the Arid Soils of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica
title_short Microbial Community Responses to Increased Water and Organic Matter in the Arid Soils of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica
title_sort microbial community responses to increased water and organic matter in the arid soils of the mcmurdo dry valleys, antarctica
topic Microbiology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4947590/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27486436
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2016.01040
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