Abstract
Microbial communities thriving in hypersaline brines of solar salterns are highly resistant and resilient to environmental changes, and salinity is a major factor that deterministically influences community structure. Here, we demonstrate that this resilience occurs even after rapid osmotic shocks caused by a threefold change in salinity (a reduction from 34 to 12% salts) leading to massive amounts of archaeal cell lysis. Specifically, our temporal metagenomic datasets identified two co-occurring ecotypes within the most dominant archaeal population of the brines Haloquadratum walsbyi that exhibited different salt concentration preferences. The dominant ecotype was generally more abundant and occurred in high-salt conditions (34%); the low abundance ecotype always co-occurred but was enriched at salinities around 20% or lower and carried unique gene content related to solute transport and gene regulation. Despite their apparent distinct ecological preferences, the ecotypes did not outcompete each other presumably due to weak functional differentiation between them. Further, the osmotic shock selected for a temporal increase in taxonomic and functional diversity at both the Hqr. walsbyi population and whole-community levels supporting the specialization-disturbance hypothesis, that is, the expectation that disturbance favors generalists. Altogether, our results provide new insights into how intraspecies diversity is maintained in light of substantial gene-content differences and major environmental perturbations.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Arantxa López for DNA extraction and Vladimir Benes for metagenomes sequencing. The authors would especially like to thank the whole team at Salinas d’Es Trenc and Gusto Mundial Balearides, S.L. (Flor de Sal d´Es Trenc) for allowing access to their facilities and their support in performing the experiments. This study was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy projects CGL2012-39627-C03-03, CLG2015_66686-C3-1-P and PGC2018-096956-B-C41 (to RRM), CGL2015_66686-C3-3-P (to JA) and also supported with European Regional Development Fund (FEDER) funds. RA was financed by the Max Planck Society. KTK’s research was supported, in part, by the U.S. National Science Foundation (Award No. 1831582). TV received a pre-doctoral fellowship (Nr BES-2013-064420) from the Spanish Government Ministry for Finance and Competition. RRM acknowledges the financial support of the sabbatical stay at Georgia Tech supported by the grant PRX18/00048 of the Ministry of Sciences, Innovation and Universities.
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Viver, T., Conrad, R.E., Orellana, L.H. et al. Distinct ecotypes within a natural haloarchaeal population enable adaptation to changing environmental conditions without causing population sweeps. ISME J 15, 1178–1191 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41396-020-00842-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41396-020-00842-5
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