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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Pip MooreORCiD, Hannah Earp, Dr Adam Gouraguine
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. Ecological communities are structured by a range of processes that operate over a range of spatial scales. While our understanding of such biodiversity patterns in macro-communities is well studied, our understanding at the microbial level is still lacking. Bacteria can be free living or associated with host eukaryotes, forming part of a wider “microbiome,” which is fundamental for host performance and health. For habitat forming foundation-species, host-bacteria relationships likely play disproportionate roles in mediating processes for the wider ecosystem. Here, we describe host-bacteria communities across multiple spatial scales (i.e., from 10s of m to 100s of km) in the understudied kelp, Eisenia cokeri, in Peru. We found that E. cokeri supports a distinct bacterial community compared to the surrounding seawater, but the structure of these communities varied markedly at the regional (~480 km), site (1–10 km), and individual (10s of m) scale. The marked regional-scale differences we observed may be driven by a range of processes, including temperature, upwelling intensity, or regional connectivity patterns. However, despite this variability, we observed consistency in the form of a persistent core community at the genus level. Here, the genera Arenicella, Blastopirellula, Granulosicoccus, and Litorimonas were found in >80% of samples and comprised ~53% of total sample abundance. These genera have been documented within bacterial communities associated with kelps and other seaweed species from around the world and may be important for host function and wider ecosystem health in general.
Author(s): King NG, Uribe R, Moore PJ, Earp HS, Gouraguine A, Hinostroza D, Perez-Matus A, Smith K, Smale DA
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Microbial Ecology
Year: 2023
Volume: 86
Pages: 2574–2582
Online publication date: 07/07/2023
Acceptance date: 29/06/2023
Date deposited: 04/08/2023
ISSN (print): 0095-3628
ISSN (electronic): 1432-184X
Publisher: Springer Nature
URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-023-02262-2
DOI: 10.1007/s00248-023-02262-2
ePrints DOI: 10.57711/vp9s-f874
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