Chuck Pepe-Ranney edited Discussion.tex  almost 10 years ago

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While there are only a few studies that attempt to compare biofilm community composition and the overlyng planktonic community abundance, those studies that have addressed this question illustrate community composition among the two habitats are unique with very few taxa found in both (Besemer 2007, Besemer 2012, Jackson 2001, Lyautey et al. 2005). This is consistent with our findings in this experimental system with a natural marine planktonic source commmunity. Our study also evaluates algal community composition which showed a similar result suggesting that both the algal and bacterial biofilm communities form from phylogenetically unique organisms that exist in low abundance in surrounding habitat but are readily enriched in the biofilm lifestyle.   Specifically, we found that most of the biofilm enriched algal  OTUs were \textit{Bacillariophyta} but there were also many \textit{Bacillariophya} OTUs enriched in the planktonic libraries. \textit{Cryptophyta} and \textit{Viridiplantae} were more uniformly enriched in the planktonic algal libraries. It appears that these broad taxonomic groups are selected against in biofilms under our experimental conditions. Alternatively, \textit{Cryptophyta} and \textit{Viridiplantae} may be selected for in the planktonic environment and exhibit growth rates sufficient for this signal to arise in our experimental residence time or they are numerically dominant taxa in the source community. Bacterial OTUs enriched in planktonic samples displayed more dramatic differential abundance patterns than bacterial OTUs enriched in biofilm samples, but, biofilm enriched bacterial OTUs were spread across a greater phylogenetic breadth (Figure 6). This is also consistent with greater niche diversity in the biofilm environment as opposed to planktonic. The greater niche diversity would select for a more diverse set of taxa but individual taxa would not be as numerically dominant as in the more niche-uniform planktonic samples. At the order level, bacterial taxonomic groups with environment enriched OTUs tend to have both plantonic and biofilm riched examples suggesting the phylogenetic coherence of this trait is not captured in broad groupings. It should be noted however that taxonomic annotations in reference databasees and therefore environmental sequence collections show little equivalency in phylogenetic breadth between groups at the same taxonomic rank \cite{Schloss_2011}. At higher taxonomic resolution (e.g. Genus-level), groups did not possess a sufficient number of OTUs to evaluate coherence between taxonomic annotation and environment type preference.