Publication Date:
2022-05-26
Description:
Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2008. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Springer for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Extremophiles 13 (2009): 151-167, doi:10.1007/s00792-008-0206-2.
Description:
Environmental factors restrict the distribution of microbial eukaryotes but the
exact boundaries for eukaryotic life are not known. Here we examine protistan
communities at the extremes of salinity and osmotic pressure, and report rich
assemblages inhabiting Bannock and Discovery, two deep-sea superhaline
anoxic basins in the Mediterranean. Using a rRNA-based approach, we detected
1538 protistan rRNA gene sequences from water samples with total salinity
ranging from 39 g/kg to 280 g/Kg, and obtained evidence that this DNA was
endogenous to the extreme habitats sampled. Statistical analyses indicate that
the discovered phylotypes represent only a fraction of species actually inhabiting
both the brine and the brine-seawater interface, with as much as 82% of the
actual richness missed by our survey. Jaccard indices (e.g., for a comparison of
community membership) suggest that the brine/interface protistan communities
are unique to Bannock and Discovery basins, and share little (0.8-2.8%) in
species composition with overlying waters with typical marine salinity and oxygen
tension. The protistan communities from the basins’ brine and brine/seawater
interface appear to be particularly enriched with dinoflagellates, ciliates and other
alveolates, as well as fungi, and are conspicuously poor in stramenopiles. The
uniqueness and diversity of brine and brine-interface protistan communities make
them promising targets for protistan discovery.
Description:
This study was supported by grant grant STO414/2-4 of the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft, the EuroDEEP program of the European Science
Foundation under 06-EuroDEEP-FP-004 MIDDLE project and NSF-grant MCB-
0348341
Keywords:
Anoxic
;
Brine
;
Community structure
;
Deep-sea
;
DHAB
;
Hypersaline
;
Molecular diversity
;
Protists
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Preprint
Format:
application/pdf
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