Incubation and Grazing Effects on Spirotrich Ciliate Diversity Inferred from Molecular Analyses of Microcosm Experiments

Authors

Jean David Grattepanche, Smith College
Doris L. Juarez, Smith College
Cameah C. Wood, Smith College
George B. McManus, University of Connecticut Avery Point Campus
Laura A. Katz, Smith CollegeFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

5-6-2019

Publication Title

PLoS ONE

Abstract

We used an experimental approach of analyzing marine microcosms to evaluate the impact of both predation (top-down) and food resources (bottom-up) on spirotrich ciliate communities. To assess the diversity, we used two molecular methods-denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) and high-throughput sequencing (HTS). We carried out two types of experiments to measure top-down (adult copepods as predators) and bottom-up effects (phytoplankton as food resources) on the spirotrich ciliates. We observed both strong incubation effects (untreated controls departed from initial assessment of diversity) and high variability across replicates within treatments, particularly for the bottom-up experiments. This suggests a rapid community turn-over during incubation and differential susceptibility to the effects of experimental manipulation. Despite the variability, our analyses reveal some broad patterns such as (1) increasing adult copepod predator abundance had a greater impact on spirotrich ciliates than on other microbial eukaryotes; (2) there was no evidence for strong food selection by the dominant spirotrich ciliates.

Volume

14

Issue

5

DOI

10.1371/JOURNAL.PONE.0215874

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Rights

© 2019 Grattepanche 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.

Comments

Archived as published.

Recommended Citation

Grattepanche, Jean David; Juarez, Doris L.; Wood, Cameah C.; McManus, George B.; and Katz, Laura A., "Incubation and Grazing Effects on Spirotrich Ciliate Diversity Inferred from Molecular Analyses of Microcosm Experiments" (2019). Biological Sciences: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/bio_facpubs/90