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Published online on June 25, 2007, 10.1073/pnas.0611525104
PNAS | July 3, 2007 | vol. 104 | no. 27 | 11436-11440


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BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES / MICROBIOLOGY
Global patterns in bacterial diversity

Catherine A. Lozupone* and Rob Knight{dagger},{ddagger}

*Departments of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and {dagger}Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309

Edited by Norman R. Pace, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, and approved May 29, 2007 (received for review December 22, 2006)

Microbes are difficult to culture. Consequently, the primary source of information about a fundamental evolutionary topic, life's diversity, is the environmental distribution of gene sequences. We report the most comprehensive analysis of the environmental distribution of bacteria to date, based on 21,752 16S rRNA sequences compiled from 111 studies of diverse physical environments. We clustered the samples based on similarities in the phylogenetic lineages that they contain and found that, surprisingly, the major environmental determinant of microbial community composition is salinity rather than extremes of temperature, pH, or other physical and chemical factors represented in our samples. We find that sediments are more phylogenetically diverse than any other environment type. Surprisingly, soil, which has high species-level diversity, has below-average phylogenetic diversity. This work provides a framework for understanding the impact of environmental factors on bacterial evolution and for the direction of future sequencing efforts to discover new lineages.

environmental distribution | microbial ecology | phylogenetic diversity | UniFrac

Author contributions: R.K. designed research; C.A.L. performed research; C.A.L. analyzed data; and C.A.L. wrote the paper.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.

This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/0611525104/DC1.

{ddagger}To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: rob{at}spot.colorado.edu

© 2007 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA


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Nucleic Acids Res., September 25, 2007; 35(18): e120 - e120.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]