No abstract

Despite their obvious importance, our knowledge about the eukaryotic microbial diversity of inland waters is still limited and poorly documented. We applied 18S rDNA amplicon sequencing to provide a comprehensive analysis of eukaryotic diversity in 74 low-productivity lakes along a 750 km longitudinal transect (5.40-18.52°E) across southern Scandinavia. We detected a wide diversity of pelagic microbial eukaryotes, classified into 1882 operational taxonomic units (OTUs). The highest OTU richness was found in traditional phytoplankton groups like Dinoflagellata, Chrysophyceae, Chlorophyta and Cryptophyta. A total of 53.6% OTUs were primarily autotrophic, while 19.4% of the heterotrophic OTUs belonged to putative parasitic taxa. Except for a longitudinal trend in the relative influence of mixotrophs, there were no significant associations between major functional groups (autotrophs, heterotrophs and parasites) and spatial and environmental variables. Community dissimilarity increased significantly with increasing geographical distance between lakes. In accordance with earlier, microscopy-based surveys in this region, we demonstrate distinct gradients in protistan diversity and community composition, which are better explained by spatial structure than local environment. The strong association between longitude and protistan diversity is probably better explained by differences in regional species pools due to differences in landscape productivity than by dispersal limitation or climatic constraints.

The diet plays a major role in shaping gut microbiome composition and function in both humans and animals, and dietary intervention trials are often used to investigate and understand these effects. A plethora of statistical methods for analysing the differential abundance of microbial taxa exists, and new methods are constantly being developed, but there is a lack of benchmarking studies and clear consensus on the best multivariate statistical practices. This makes it hard for a biologist to decide which method to use. We compared the outcomes of generic multivariate ANOVA (ASCA and FFMANOVA) against statistical methods commonly used for community analyses (PERMANOVA and SIMPER) and methods designed for analysis of count data from high-throughput sequencing experiments (ALDEx2, ANCOM and DESeq2). The comparison is based on both simulated data and five published dietary intervention trials representing different subjects and study designs. We found that the methods testing differences at the community level were in agreement regarding both effect size and statistical significance. However, the methods that provided ranking and identification of differentially abundant operational taxonomic units (OTUs) gave incongruent results, implying that the choice of method is likely to influence the biological interpretations. The generic multivariate ANOVA tools have the flexibility needed for analysing multifactorial experiments and provide outputs at both the community and OTU levels; good performance in the simulation studies suggests that these statistical tools are also suitable for microbiome data sets.

Covariation in species richness and community structure across taxonomical groups (cross‐taxon congruence) has practical consequences for the identification of biodiversity surrogates and proxies, as well as theoretical ramifications for understanding the mechanisms maintaining and sustaining biodiversity. We found there to exist a high cross‐taxon congruence between phytoplankton, zooplankton, and fish in 73 large Scandinavian lakes across a 750 km longitudinal transect. The fraction of the total diversity variation explained by local environment alone was small for all trophic levels while a substantial fraction could be explained by spatial gradient variables. Almost half of the explained variation could not be resolved between local and spatial factors, possibly due to confounding issues between longitude and landscape productivity. There is strong consensus that the longitudinal gradient found in the regional fish community results from postglacial dispersal limitations, while there is much less evidence for the species richness and community structure gradients at lower trophic levels being directly affected by dispersal limitation over the same time scale. We found strong support for bidirectional interactions between fish and zooplankton species richness, while corresponding interactions between phytoplankton and zooplankton richness were much weaker. Both the weakening of the linkage at lower trophic levels and the bidirectional nature of the interaction indicates that the underlying mechanism must be qualitatively different from a trophic cascade.