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The STUDIA UNIVERSITATIS BABEŞ-BOLYAI issue article summary
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Abstract: Microorganisms are essential to our biosphere and, as such, understanding the mechanisms underlying their resilience is essential to predict the impact of climate change on Earth’s ecosystems. In the most arid deserts on Earth, endolithic microbial communities colonize the rocks’ interior as a survival strategy; because of their extreme nature, these communities are particularly sensitive to environmental changes. Over a 4-year longitudinal study, using shotgun metagenomic sequencing, we characterize the temporal response of a highly specialized community inhabiting halite (salt rocks) in the Atacama Desert, to a catastrophic rainfall. Halite communities harbor mostly members of the Archaea, unique cyanobacteria, diverse heterotrophic bacteria, and a novel type of algae (Crits-Christoph et al., 2016). Our results suggest an initial response to the rain in which the community entered an unstable intermediate state after stochastic niche re-colonization, resulting in broad predicted protein adaptations to increased water availability. In contrast, during recovery, the community returned to its former functional potential by a gradual shift in abundances of the newly acquired taxa (Uritskiy et al., 2019). The characterization these two modes of community response could potentially be applied to other ecosystems, providing a theoretical framework for prediction of taxonomic and functional flux following environmental changes. At the molecular level, we discovered hundreds of small RNAs with potential regulatory roles and taxonomically assigned to diverse members of the halite community. Our data demonstrate that field experiments, linking environmental variation with changes in RNA pools, have potential to provide new insights into environmental sensing and response in natural microbial communities.
Keywords: halite, microbial communities, sRNAs, stress response. |
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