Deep-sea anthropogenic macrodebris harbours rich and diverse communities of bacteria and archaea

The deep sea is the largest biome on earth, and microbes dominate in biomass and abundance. Anthropogenic litter is now almost ubiquitous in this biome, and its deposition creates new habitats and environments, including for microbial assemblages. With the ever increasing accumulation of this debris, it is timely to identify and describe the bacterial and archaeal communities that are able to form biofilms on macrodebris in the deep sea. Using 16S rRNA gene high throughput sequencing, we show for the first time the composition of bacteria and archaea on macrodebris collected from the deep sea. Our data suggest differences in the microbial assemblage composition across litter of different materials including metal, rubber, glass, fabric and plastic. These results imply that anthropogenic macrodebris provide diverse habitats for bacterial and archaeal biofilms and each may harbour distinct microbial communities.

Citation

Woodall LC, Jungblut AD, Hopkins K, Hall A, Robinson LF, Gwinnett C, et al. (2018) Deep-sea anthropogenic macrodebris harbours rich and diverse communities of bacteria and archaea. PLoS ONE 13(11): e0206220. https://doi.org/10.1371/ journal.pone.0206220

Type

Journal Article

Item Description

© 2018 Woodall et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The attached file is the published version of the article.
NHM Repository

ISSN

1932-6203