Annually reoccurring bacterial communities are predictable from ocean conditions

doi:10.1073/pnas.0602399103

Annually reoccurring bacterial communities are predictable from ocean conditions

*Department of Biological Sciences and Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Southern California, 3616 Trousdale Parkway, Los Angeles, CA 90089; and
^¶Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology, Columbia University, 1200 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027

Edited by James M. Tiedje, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, and approved July 6, 2006 (received for review March 23, 2006)

Abstract

Factors influencing patterns in the distribution and abundance of plant and animal taxa modulate ecosystem function and ecosystem response to environmental change, which is often taken to infer low functional redundancy among such species, but such relationships are poorly known for microbial communities. Using high-resolution molecular fingerprinting, we demonstrate the existence of extraordinarily repeatable temporal patterns in the community composition of 171 operational taxonomic units of marine bacterioplankton over 4.5 years at our Microbial Observatory site, 20 km off the southern California coast. These patterns in distribution and abundance of microbial taxa were highly predictable and significantly influenced by a broad range of both abiotic and biotic factors. These findings provide statistically robust demonstration of temporal patterning in marine bacterial distribution and abundance, which suggests that the distribution and abundance of bacterial taxa may modulate ecosystem function and response and that a significant subset of the bacteria exhibit low levels of functional redundancy as documented for many plant and animal communities.

Footnotes

^†To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: fuhrman{at}usc.edu
↵ ^‡Present address: Department of Ocean Sciences, University of California, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95064.
↵ ^§Present Address: Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, 2680 Woodlawn Drive, Honolulu, HI 96822-1897.
Author contributions: J.A.F. designed research; I.H., M.S.S., J.A.S., and M.V.B. performed research; J.A.F., I.H., M.S.S., J.A.S., M.V.B., and S.N. analyzed data; and J.A.F. and S.N. wrote the paper.
Conflict of interest statement: No conflicts declared.
This paper was submitted directly (Track II) to the PNAS office.
Data deposition: The sequences reported in this paper have been deposited in the GenBank database (accession nos. DQ009149, DQ157868, AY552545, DQ009145, DQ009143, AF408841, DQ009091, DQ009159, DQ009157, DQ009203, DQ009262, DQ009194, DQ009272, DQ009253, AF408829, NC_007205, AY033325, DQ009256, AF151254, DQ009166, AY033323, DQ009368, DQ009104, DQ157869, DQ646394, NC_007335, DQ009365, and DQ009156).
Abbreviations::

ARISA,

automated ribosomal intergenic spacer analysis;

OTU,

operational taxonomic unit;

DFA,

discriminant function analysis;

TSA,

time series analysis;

MRA,

multiple regression analyses.