School of Biosciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
Australian Institute of Marine Science, Townsville MC, Queensland, Australia.
ISME J. 2018 Jan;12(1):300-303. doi: 10.1038/ismej.2017.164. Epub 2017 Oct 20.
Physiological performance, disease and bleaching prevalence are often patchy within individual coral colonies. These responses are largely influenced by coral-associated microbes, but how the coral microbiome changes over small spatial scales has never been quantified before. We performed a high-resolution quantification of the spatial scale of microbial species turnover (β-diversity) within skeletons of boulder-forming Porites corals. We found very strong prokaryotic species turnover across spatial scales ranging from 4 mm to 2 m within individual colonies, possibly resulting from dispersal limitation and microbial interactions. The microalgal community was more homogeneously distributed, which is likely due to these photosymbionts actively boring through limestone. Our findings highlight unprecedented levels of intra-colony heterogeneity in the skeletal microbiome, which has implications for the experimental design of coral microbiome studies and for our understanding of coral resilience.
生理表现、疾病和漂白现象在单个珊瑚群体中往往是不均匀的。这些反应在很大程度上受到珊瑚相关微生物的影响，但珊瑚微生物组在小空间尺度上的变化从未被量化过。我们对巨石状鹿角珊瑚骨骼内微生物物种（β多样性）的空间尺度进行了高分辨率的定量分析。我们发现，在单个群体内，从 4 毫米到 2 米的空间尺度上，存在着非常强烈的原核生物物种更替，这可能是由于扩散限制和微生物相互作用所致。微藻群落的分布更加均匀，这可能是由于这些共生藻类积极地在石灰岩中钻孔。我们的发现强调了骨骼微生物组中前所未有的群体内异质性，这对珊瑚微生物组研究的实验设计和我们对珊瑚弹性的理解具有重要意义。
