From the High Arctic to the Equator: Do Soil Metagenomes Differ According to Our Expectations?

From the High Arctic to the Equator: Do Soil Metagenomes Differ According to Our Expectations? Microb Ecol. 2018 Jun 07;: Authors: Kerfahi D, Tripathi BM, Dong K, Kim M, Kim H, Ferry Slik JW, Go R, Adams JM Abstract Comparing the functional gene composition of soils at opposite extremes of environmental gradients may allow testing of hypotheses about community and ecosystem function. Here, we were interested in comparing how tropical microbial ecosystems differ from those of polar climates. We sampled several sites in the equatorial rainforest of Malaysia and Brunei, and the high Arctic of Svalbard, Canada, and Greenland, comparing the composition and the functional attributes of soil biota between the two extremes of latitude, using shotgun metagenomic Illumina HiSeq2000 sequencing. Based upon "classical" views of how tropical and higher latitude ecosystems differ, we made a series of predictions as to how various gene function categories would differ in relative abundance between tropical and polar environments. Results showed that in some respects our predictions were correct: the polar samples had higher relative abundance of dormancy related genes, and lower relative abundance of genes associated with respiration, and with metabolism of aromatic compounds. The network complexity of the Arctic was also lower than the tropics. However, in various other respects, the pattern was not as predicted; there were no differences in relati...
Source: Microbial Ecology - Category: Microbiology Authors: Tags: Microb Ecol Source Type: research