Abstract
In the transition zone of the shifting permafrost border, thaw ponds emerge as hotspots of microbial activity, processing the ancient carbon freed from the permafrost. We analyzed the microbial succession across a gradient of recently emerged to older ponds using three molecular markers: one universal, one bacterial and one fungal. Age was a major modulator of the microbial community of the thaw ponds. Surprisingly, typical freshwater taxa comprised only a small fraction of the community. Instead, thaw ponds of all age classes were dominated by enigmatic bacterial and fungal phyla. Our results on permafrost thaw ponds lead to a revised perception of the thaw pond ecosystem and their microbes, with potential implications for carbon and nutrient cycling in this increasingly important class of freshwaters.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the CEN Whapmagoostui-Kuujjuarapik Station and Claude Tremblay for the use of laboratory space and transportation to the SAS2 site. Karólína Einarsdottir, Maxime Wauthy, David-Alexandre Gauthier, Felix Faucher, and Julien Lebrun are acknowledged for their help with the sampling, Caroline Ponsonby for the map of the sampling site, Pilar Lopez-Hernandez for her help with the molecular laboratory work, Alexander Eiler for processing the bacterial amplicon data, and Jerome Comte for comments on an early draft of the manuscript. The funding was provided by the Academy of Finland (grant 265902 to SP), the International Network for Terrestrial Research and Monitoring in the Arctic (INTERACT; grant to SP), and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions (grant CRYPTRANS to CW). Financial support was further provided by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Canada Research Chair program.
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Wurzbacher, C., Nilsson, R., Rautio, M. et al. Poorly known microbial taxa dominate the microbiome of permafrost thaw ponds. ISME J 11, 1938–1941 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2017.54
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2017.54
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