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Similarities and Contrasts in the Archaeal Community of Two Japanese Mountains: Mt. Norikura Compared to Mt. Fuji

  • Environmental Microbiology
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Abstract

The community ecology, abundance, and diversity patterns of soil archaea are poorly understood—despite the fact that they are a major branch of life that is ubiquitous and important in nitrogen cycling in terrestrial ecosystems. We set out to investigate the elevational patterns of archaeal ecology, and how these compare with other groups of organisms. Many studies of different groups of organisms (plants, birds, etc.) have shown a series of distinct communities with elevation, and often a diversity maximum in mid-elevations. We investigated the soil archaeal communities on Mt. Norikura, Japan, using 454 pyrosequencing of the 16S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) gene. There was a strong mid-elevation maximum in diversity, and a mid-elevation maximum in abundance of soil archaea 16S rRNA and amoA genes. These diversity and abundance maximums could not be correlated with any identifiable soil parameter, nor plant diversity. Discrete, predictable communities of archaea occurred at each elevational level, also not explicable in terms of pH or major nutrients. When we compared the archaeal community and diversity patterns with those found in an earlier study of Mt Fuji, both mountains showed mid-elevation maximums in diversity and abundance of archaea, possibly a result of some common environmental factor such as soil disturbance frequency. However, they showed distinct sets of archaeal communities at similar elevational sampling points. Presumably, the difference reflects their distinct geology (Norikura being andesitic, while Fuji is basaltic) and the resulting combinations of soil chemistry and environmental conditions, although no explanatory variable was found. Clearly, many soil archaea have strongly defined niches and will only occur in a narrow subset of the range of possible climate and soil conditions. The findings of a mid-elevation diversity maximum on Norikura provides a further instance of how widespread this unexplained pattern is in nature, in a wide variety of groups of organisms.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Environmental Genomics Division, CSIR-NEERI, Nehru Marg, Nagpur, 440020, India

    Dharmesh Singh, Jungok Park & Jonathan M. Adams

  2. Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, Shinshu University, Asahi 3-1-1, Matsumoto, 390-8621, Japan

    Koichi Takahashi

  3. Institute of Mountain Science, Shinshu University, Asahi 3-1-1, Matsumoto, 390-8621, Japan

    Koichi Takahashi

  4. School of Biological Sciences, College of Natural Sciences, Seoul National University, Seoul, 151-742, South Korea

    Jonathan M. Adams

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  1. Dharmesh Singh
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Correspondence to Jonathan M. Adams.

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Supplementary Fig. S1

Archaeal phyla breakdown for Mt. Fuji (a) and Mt. Norikura (b) (GIF 35 kb)

High resolution image (TIFF 182 kb)

Supplementary Fig. S2

Relative abundance of the four most abundant archaeal sub-phyla on Mt. Fuji (a) and Mt. Norikura (b) (Mean ± SE) in relation to pH. Significance level is shown at ***P < 0.001, **P < 0.01, and *P < 0.05. (GIF 38 kb)

High resolution image (TIFF 1155 kb)

Supplementary Fig. S3

Distribution of Thaumarchaeal group I.1b percent relative abundance (solid line; pyrosequencing results) vs. amoA gene copies per gram of soil (dashed line; qPCR results) in relation to elevation on Mt. Fuji (a) and Mt. Norikura (b). Data from biological replicates at each elevational zones were averaged prior to statistical analysis. (GIF 17 kb)

High resolution image (TIFF 250 kb)

Supplementary Fig. S4

NMDS plot on the Euclidean distances from normalized environmental variables. (GIF 14 kb)

High resolution image (TIFF 53 kb)

Supplementary Fig. S5

Venn diagram representing overall overlap of OTUs for Thaumarchaeal Group I.1b (GIF 44 kb)

High resolution image (TIFF 95 kb)

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Singh, D., Takahashi, K., Park, J. et al. Similarities and Contrasts in the Archaeal Community of Two Japanese Mountains: Mt. Norikura Compared to Mt. Fuji. Microb Ecol 71, 428–441 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-015-0681-9

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