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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Pip MooreORCiD
This is the authors' accepted manuscript of an article that has been published in its final definitive form by Springer New York LLC, 2022.
For re-use rights please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.
© 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. Kelp species are distributed along ~ 25% of the world’s coastlines and the forests they form represent some of the world’s most productive and diverse ecosystems. Like other marine habitat–formers, the associated microbial community is fundamental for host and, in turn, wider ecosystem functioning. Given there are thousands of bacteria-host associations, determining which relationships are important remains a major challenge. We characterised the associated bacteria of two habitat-forming kelp species, Laminaria hyperborea and Saccharina latissima, from eight sites across a range of spatial scales (10 s of metres to 100 s of km) in the northeast Atlantic. We found no difference in diversity or community structure between the two kelps, but there was evidence of regional structuring (across 100 s km) and considerable variation between individuals (10 s of metres). Within sites, individuals shared few amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) and supported a very small proportion of diversity found across the wider study area. However, consistent characteristics between individuals were observed with individual host communities containing a small conserved “core” (8–11 ASVs comprising 25 and 32% of sample abundances for L. hyperborea and S. latissima, respectively). At a coarser taxonomic resolution, communities were dominated by four classes (Planctomycetes, Gammaproteobacteria, Alphaproteobacteria and Bacteroidia) that made up ~ 84% of sample abundances. Remaining taxa (47 classes) made up very little contribution to overall abundance but the majority of taxonomic diversity. Overall, our study demonstrates the consistent features of kelp bacterial communities across large spatial scales and environmental gradients and provides an ecologically meaningful baseline to track environmental change.
Author(s): King NG, Moore PJ, Thorpe JM, Smale DA
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Microbial Ecology
Year: 2022
Pages: Epub ahead of print
Online publication date: 20/05/2022
Acceptance date: 09/05/2022
Date deposited: 06/06/2022
ISSN (print): 0095-3628
ISSN (electronic): 1432-184X
Publisher: Springer New York LLC
URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-022-02038-0
DOI: 10.1007/s00248-022-02038-0
ePrints DOI: 10.57711/c8rk-nc72
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