Effect of oxygen minimum zone formation on communities of marine protists

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2012. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Nature Publishing Group for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in The ISME Journal 6 (2012): 1586–1601, doi:10.1038/ismej.2012.7.Changes in ocean temperature and circulation patterns compounded by human activities are leading to oxygen minimum zone expansion with concomitant alteration in nutrient and climate active trace gas cycling. Here, we report the response of microbial eukaryote populations to seasonal changes in water column oxygen-deficiency using Saanich Inlet, a seasonally anoxic fjord on the coast of Vancouver Island British Columbia, as a model ecosystem. We combine small subunit ribosomal RNA gene sequencing approaches with multivariate statistical methods to reveal shifts in operational taxonomic units during successive stages of seasonal stratification and renewal. A meta-analysis is used to identify common and unique patterns of community composition between Saanich Inlet and the anoxic/sulfidic Cariaco Basin (Venezuela) and Framvaren Fjord (Norway) to show shared and unique responses of microbial eukaryotes to oxygen and sulfide in these three environments. Our analyses also reveal temporal fluctuations in rare populations of microbial eukaryotes, particularly anaerobic ciliates, that may be of significant importance to the biogeochemical cycling of methane in oxygen minimum zones.This work was performed under the auspices of the US Department of Energy's Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research Program, and by the University of California, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract No., and Los Alamos National Laboratory (Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231, DE-AC52-07NA27344, DE-AC02-06NA25396), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada 328256-07 and STPSC 356988, Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) 17444; Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), NSF MCB-0348407 to VE, NSF Center for Deep Energy Biosphere Investigations, and the Center for Bioinorganic Chemistry (CEBIC).2012-09-0