Microbial diversity in the deep sea and the underexplored “rare biosphere”

Abstract

The evolution of marine microbes over billions of years predicts that the composition of microbial communities should be much greater than the published estimates of a few thousand distinct kinds of microbes per liter of seawater. By adopting a massively parallel tag sequencing strategy, we show that bacterial communities of deep water masses of the North Atlantic and diffuse flow hydrothermal vents are one to two orders of magnitude more complex than previously reported for any microbial environment. A relatively small number of different populations dominate all samples, but thousands of low-abundance populations account for most of the observed phylogenetic diversity. This ''rare biosphere'' is very ancient and may represent a nearly inexhaustible source of genomic innovation. Members of the rare biosphere are highly divergent from each other and, at different times in earth's history, may have had a profound impact on shaping planetary processes.biodiversity ͉ low abundance ͉ marine ͉ microbes ͉ rarefaction

Performance and microbial community composition in a long-term sequential anaerobic-aerobic bioreactor operation treating coking wastewater

“…Barcoded pyrosequencing of phylogenetic marker gene amplicons explores the diversity and composition of microbial communities at a high level of resolution (Sogin et al 2006). The microbial diversity profile obtained by 454 pyrosequencing of bacterial 16S rRNA genes revealed a total of 72,069 effective sequence reads (average length 472.7 bp) from six sludge samples assigned to 2318 OTUs (97 % similarity).…”

Vertical Distribution of Functional Potential and Active Microbial Communities in Meromictic Lake Kivu

“…According to Lennon and Jones [6], core community shifts, including active, dormant, and dead cells, may vary widely along vertical gradients, contributing to the community dynamics as well as to the maintenance of ecosystem biodiversity and ecosystem stability. Currently, high-throughput sequencing technology provides an opportunity to detect greater microbial diversity than the one detected by previous techniques [7][8][9]. It has revealed that the core community is composed of abundant and rare taxa that are in continuous exchange based on the Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00248-015-0612-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.…”

Geo-Chip analysis reveals reduced functional diversity of the bacterial community at a dumping site for dredged Elbe sediment

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