Abstract
Over 200 years ago Alexander von Humboldt (1808) observed that plant and animal diversity peaks at tropical latitudes and decreases toward the poles, a trend he attributed to more favorable temperatures in the tropics. Studies to date suggest that this temperature–diversity gradient is weak or nonexistent for Bacteria and Archaea. To test the impacts of temperature as well as pH on bacterial and archaeal diversity, we performed pyrotag sequencing of 16S rRNA genes retrieved from 165 soil, sediment and biomat samples of 36 geothermal areas in Canada and New Zealand, covering a temperature range of 7.5–99 °C and a pH range of 1.8–9.0. This represents the widest ranges of temperature and pH yet examined in a single microbial diversity study. Species richness and diversity indices were strongly correlated to temperature, with R2 values up to 0.62 for neutral–alkaline springs. The distributions were unimodal, with peak diversity at 24 °C and decreasing diversity at higher and lower temperature extremes. There was also a significant pH effect on diversity; however, in contrast to previous studies of soil microbial diversity, pH explained less of the variability (13–20%) than temperature in the geothermal samples. No correlation was observed between diversity values and latitude from the equator, and we therefore infer a direct temperature effect in our data set. These results demonstrate that temperature exerts a strong control on microbial diversity when considered over most of the temperature range within which life is possible.
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Acknowledgements
The work was supported by an Alberta Innovates-Technology Futures (AITF) New Faculty Award and a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grant to PD, as well as by a Geothermal Resources of New Zealand (GRN) funding to MBS. CES was supported by doctoral fellowships from NSERC and AITF. ALB was supported by a postdoctoral award from NSERC.
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Sharp, C., Brady, A., Sharp, G. et al. Humboldt’s spa: microbial diversity is controlled by temperature in geothermal environments. ISME J 8, 1166–1174 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2013.237
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2013.237
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