Fungal endophyte communities reflect environmental structuring across a Hawaiian landscape
- 25 July 2012
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
- Vol. 109 (32), 13022-13027
- https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1209872109
Abstract
We surveyed endophytic fungal communities in leaves of a single tree species (Metrosideros polymorpha) across wide environmental gradients (500-5,500 mm of rain/y; 10-22 degrees C mean annual temperature) spanning short geographic distances on Mauna Loa Volcano, Hawai'i. Using barcoded amplicon pyrosequencing at 13 sites (10 trees/site; 10 leaves/tree), we found very high levels of diversity within sites (a mean of 551 +/- 134 taxonomic units per site). However, among-site diversity contributed even more than did within-site diversity to the overall richness of more than 4,200 taxonomic units observed in M. polymorpha, and this among-site variation in endophyte community composition correlated strongly with temperature and rainfall. These results are consistent with suggestions that foliar endophytic fungi are hyperdiverse. They further suggest that microbial diversity may be even greater than has been assumed and that broad-scale environmental controls such as temperature and rainfall can structure eukaryotic microbial diversity. Appropriately constrained study systems across strong environmental gradients present a useful means to understand the environmental factors that structure the diversity of microbial communities.Keywords
This publication has 86 references indexed in Scilit:
- Microbiology of the phyllosphere: a playground for testing ecological conceptsOecologia, 2011
- Drivers of bacterial β-diversity depend on spatial scaleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2011
- Indoor fungal composition is geographically patterned and more diverse in temperate zones than in the tropicsProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2010
- QIIME allows analysis of high-throughput community sequencing dataNature Methods, 2010
- PANGEA: pipeline for analysis of next generation ampliconsThe ISME Journal, 2010
- Microbial diversity in the deep sea and the underexplored “rare biosphere”Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2006
- Microbial biogeography: putting microorganisms on the mapNature Reviews Microbiology, 2006
- MUSCLE: multiple sequence alignment with high accuracy and high throughputNucleic Acids Research, 2004
- Leaf construction cost, nutrient concentration, and net CO 2 assimilation of native and invasive species in HawaiiOecologia, 1999
- Basic Local Alignment Search ToolJournal of Molecular Biology, 1990