Geographic and Environmental Sources of Variation in Lake Bacterial Community Composition

Abstract

This study used a genetic fingerprinting technique (automated ribosomal intergenic spacer analysis[ARISA]) to characterize microbial communities from a culture-independent perspective and to identify those environmental factors that influence the diversity of bacterial assemblages in Wisconsin lakes. The relationships between bacterial community composition and 11 environmental variables for a suite of 30 lakes from northern and southern Wisconsin were explored by canonical correspondence analysis (CCA). In addition, the study assessed the influences of ARISA fragment detection threshold (sensitivity) and the quantitative, semiquantitative, and binary (presence-absence) use of ARISA data. It was determined that the sensitivity of ARISA was influential only when presence-absence-transformed data were used. The outcomes of analyses depended somewhat on the data transformation applied to ARISA data, but there were some features common to all of the CCA models. These commonalities indicated that differences in bacterial communities were best explained by regional (i.e., northern versus southern Wisconsin lakes) and landscape level (i.e., seepage lakes versus drainage lakes) factors. ARISA profiles from May samples were consistently different from those collected in other months. In addition, communities varied along gradients of pH and water clarity (Secchi depth) both within and among regions. The results demonstrate that environmental, temporal, regional, and landscape level features interact to determine the makeup of bacterial assemblages in northern temperate lakes.

Bacterial diversity and biogeography in deep-sea surface sediments of the South Atlantic Ocean

“…The influence of both factors at intermediate scales was already shown by other studies (Green et al, 2004;Reche et al, 2005;Yannarell and Triplett, 2005), but our study suggest an effect of both factors for large scales as well, as shown for soil microbial communities (Fierer and Jackson, 2006). Although the small size, high dispersal rates, large population size and low extinction rates of microorganisms suggest a low effect of geographic barriers on microorganisms (Staley and Gosink, 1999;Beja et al, 2002;Finlay, 2002;Ramette and Tiedje, 2007), our study shows that the distribution of microorganisms in deep-sea sediments is limited at intermediate (10-3000 km) and large scales (43000 km).…”

Viral and microbial community dynamics in four aquatic environments

“…Approximately 0.1% of the microbiome sequences had significant similarity (Eo0.001) to 16S rDNA genes in the Ribosomal Database Project (Cole et al, 2007). On the basis of these similarities, the microbial communities in the freshwater ponds exhibited typical freshwater bacterial groups as previously seen in other 16S rDNA surveys of freshwater environments (Arias et al, 2004;Lindstrom et al, 2005;Yannarell and Triplett, 2005;Briee et al, 2007). Corresponding analyses of microbiomes from the solar salterns showed the expected shift to an Archaea-dominated community in the high salinity pond (RodriguezValera et al, 1985;Benlloch et al, 2002).…”

Bacterial community succession during in situ uranium bioremediation: spatial similarities along controlled flow paths

“…Ramette (2007) suggested that these tools can also be readily applied in microbial ecology to help reduce data set complexity as DNA sequence data are increasingly available because of high-throughput sequencing technologies. Indeed, microbial ecology studies have increasingly used multivariate analyses to relate environmental variation with bacterial composition in aquatic systems (Yannarell and Triplett, 2005;Kent et al, 2007;Rubin and Leff, 2007), to determine bacterial community dynamics in relation to temporal variation in marine ecosystems (Pringault et al, 2007;Sapp et al, 2007), to develop microbial communities as indicators of ecosystem stress Córdova-Kreylos et al, 2006;Fields et al, 2006), as well as to link geophysical signatures to microbial communities (Allen et al, 2007).…”