Bacterioplankton community resilience to ocean acidification: evidence from microbial network analysis

• Published in: ICES Journal of Marine Science
• Main Authors: Wang, Yu, Zhang, Rui, Zheng, Qiang, Deng, Ye, Van Nostrand, Joy D., Zhou, Jizhong, Jiao, Nianzhi
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2023
• Subjects: 59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES; Arctic; Arctic Ocean; Ocean acidification
• Online Access: http://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1581092; https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1581092; https://doi.org/10.1093/icesjms/fsv187

Ocean acidification (OA), caused by seawater CO 2 uptake, has significant impacts on marine calcifying organisms and phototrophs. However, the response of bacterial communities, who play a crucial role in marine biogeochemical cycling, to OA is still not well understood. Previous studies have shown that the diversity and structure of microbial communities change undeterminably with elevated p CO 2 . Here, novel phylogenetic molecular ecological networks (pMENs) were employed to investigate the interactions of native bacterial communities in response to OA in the Arctic Ocean through a mesocosm experiment. The pMENs results were in line with the null hypothesis that elevated p CO 2 /pH does not affect biogeochemistry processes. The number of nodes within the pMENs and the connectivity of the bacterial communities were similar, despite increased p CO 2 concentrations. Our results indicate that elevated p CO 2 did not significantly affect microbial community structure and succession in the Arctic Ocean, suggesting bacterioplankton community resilience to elevated p CO 2 . The competitive interactions among the native bacterioplankton, as well as the modular community structure, may contribute to this resilience. This pMENs-based investigation of the interactions among microbial community members at different p CO 2 concentrations provides a new insight into our understanding of how OA affects the microbial community.