Are recently deglaciated areas at both poles colonisedby the same bacteria?

• Published in: FEMS Microbiology Letters
• Main Authors: del Moral, Álvaro, Garrido-Benavent, Isaac, Durán, Jorge, Lehmann, Jan R.K., Rodríguez-Pereiras, Alexandra, Heidmarsson, Starri, Ríos, Asunción de los
• Other Authors: Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (España), European Commission, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (España), Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portugal)
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford University Press 2021
• Subjects: Amplicon sequence variant (ASV); Bipolar distributions; Cryptogams; Glacier forefield; Soils; Biogeography; Bia; Antarc*; Antarctica; glacier; Iceland
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10261/242906; https://doi.org/10.1093/femsle/fnab011; https://doi.org/10.13039/501100004837; https://doi.org/10.13039/501100001871; https://doi.org/10.13039/501100000780; https://doi.org/10.13039/501100003329

Polar glacier forefields offer an unprecedented framework for studying community assembly processes in regions that aregeographically and climatically isolated. Through amplicon sequence variant (ASV) inference, we compared thecomposition and structure of soil bacterial communities from glacier forefields in Iceland and Antarctica to assess overlapbetween communities and the impact of established cryptogamic covers on the uniqueness of their taxa. These pioneermicrobial communities were found to share only 8% of ASVs and each taxonomic group’s contribution to the shared ASVdata subset was heterogeneous and independent of their relative abundance. Although the presence of ASVs specific to oneglacier forefield and/or different cryptogam cover values confirms the existence of habitat specialist bacteria, our data showthat the influence of cryptogams on the edaphic bacterial community structure also varied also depending on thetaxonomic group. Hence, the establishment of distinct cryptogamic covers is probably not the only factor driving theuniqueness of bacterial communities at both poles. The structure of bacterial communities colonising deglaciated areasseems also conditioned by lineage-specific limitations in their dispersal capacity and/or their establishment andpersistence in these isolated and hostile regions. This work was supported by Grants CTM2015-64728-C2-2-R (MINECO/FEDER, EU) and PID2019-105469RB-C22 (AEI, MICINN).JD and AR acknowledge support from the Fundacao para Cienciae Tecnologia (IF/00950/2014 and SFRH/BDP/108913/2015, respectively), as well as from the FEDER, within the PT2020 Partnership Agreement and COMPETE 2020 (UID/BIA/04004/2013). Peer reviewed