Characterisation of coral-associated bacterial communities in an urbanised marine environment shows strong divergence over small geographic scales

Air mass source determines airborne microbial diversity at the ocean–atmosphere interface of the Great Barrier Reef marine ecosystem

“…Relative abundance of bacterial taxa between air and coral sequence libraries for all taxa with >0.05% mean relative abundance. a) direct ASV matches between our study by source and the Pootakham et al coral microbiome [20], b) direct ASV matches that are classified at genus level between our study and the Pootakham et al coral microbiome [20] c) shared ASVs (by ≥97% sequence identity) between our study and the Wainwright et al coral microbiome [21]. .…”

“…Based on these criteria, we identified a single publication [20] which allowed for direct ASV analysis. Another dataset with limited overlap was also assessed based on similarity searches of representative sequences to determine shared taxa [21]. Some excellent studies on Great Barrier Reef coral microbiomes could not be included because they have employed the V1-V3 region of the 16S rRNA gene for bacteria and this does not overlap with the V3-V4 region used in our study.…”

“…Wainwright et al, (2019) study[21] conducted paired-end Illumina sequencing of 16S rRNA gene amplicons of the coral Pocillopora acuta around Singapore. The coral study utilised comparable data processing pipeline (specifically dada2 to generate ASV) but used a different set of primers to amplify 16S rRNA gene (V4 vs our V3-V4 region).…”

Seagrass‐associated fungal communities show distance decay of similarity that has implications for seagrass management and restoration

“…Similarly, with few barriers to dispersal, fungal communities could be expected to show little differentiation over large distances. However, just as work on assumed highly dispersive marine macroorganisms has revealed biogeographic patterns contrary to the expectation of homogeneity (Rocha & Bowen, ), there is increasing evidence that this is also the case for microorganisms (Wainwright, Afiq‐Rosli, Zahn, & Huang, ; Wainwright, Bauman, Zahn, Todd, & Huang, ). For example, fungal communities associated with the widespread seagrass Syringodium isoetifolium from across the Indonesian archipelago are highly differentiated on either side of Wallace's line (Wainwright, Zahn, Arlyza, & Amend, ).…”

Air mass source determines airborne microbial diversity at the ocean-atmosphere interface of the Great Barrier Reef marine ecosystem

“…We also compared our bacterial ASV sequences with a recent study of tropical corals from the Singapore Straits, South China Sea [22] which shared significant bacterial 16S rRNA sequence overlaps (Supplementary Information, Supplementary Methods). We identified (with ≥97% sequence identities) 6.5% of coral taxa were shared with the atmospheric microbiome, and 94.4% of ocean derived air and 87.8% of continent derived air taxa were shared with the coral microbiome (Supplementary Information, Fig.…”