Ed Hall edited Results.tex  over 9 years ago

Commit id: bb984694dfedcc8a26e5017ee4bf784c7db641df

deletions | additions      

       

\subsection{Bulk community characteristics} We first assessed the effect of the resource treatments on the dissolved chemistry and bulk community characteristics of the plankton and the biofilms. Dissolved organic carbon (DOC) levels in the control and lowest C:P treatment (10) remained below 2 $\mu$moles C L$^{-1}$ throughout the course of the experiment. Altered resource C:P in the higher two C treatments (C:P 100 and 500) resulted in changes in the DOC concentration of the water column. In the intermediate treatment (C:P 100) DOC increased on the second day and then returned to the same level as the lower two treatments for the remainder of the experiment. In the high carbon (C:P 500) treatment DOC levels climbed gradually from baseline levels on the second day of the experiment to ca. 4$\mu$moles L$^{-1}$ on the sixth day of the experiment.   This increase in DOC in the higher C:P treatments was associated with decreases in planktonic Chl \textit{a} in each treament (Figure 2a), however there was no significant difference in biofilm Chl \textit{a} among treatments (Figure 2b). In combination with the decrease in planktonic Chl \textit{a} on the 6th day of the experiment the highest C:P treatment had approximately 4-fold higher planktonic bacterial abundance than the control and the 10 $\mu$M carbon treatment (Figure 2d). Similarly, biofilms had significantly higher total biomass in the high carbon treatment compared to the other treatments (Figure 2c). These differences in biomass could also be clearly visualized among biofilms grown in each treatment. Cell density, biofilm thickness and amount of apparent EPS all increased visually with increasing C:P resource treatment (Figure 3). Thus the shift in resource C:P altered the pool size of the algal and bacterial communities in both the plankton and biofilm communities. Clear differences in bacterial and algal pool size among treatments allowed us to address how shifts in pool sizes affected were related to  communityrichness and  membership and structure  within and among plankton and biofilm communities. \subsection{Planktonic and biofilm community structure} 

In bacterial libraries, sequences were distributed into 636 OTUs; 58\% of quality controlled sequences fell into the top 25 OTUs in order of decreasing sum of relative abundance across all samples. 23S plastid rRNA gene sequences were distributed into 359 OTUs; 71\% of sequences fell into the top 25 OTUs sorted by mean relative abundance across all samples. Rank abundance curves for each mesocosm specific pair of planktonic and biofilm samples showed planktonic communities to be more sharply skewed in both the algal and bacterial datasets (Figure 9).   To investigate differences in the communities strucure and membetship between the  biofilm and overlying planktonic communities we identified the OTUs that were the  most dramatically disproportinately  enriched OTUs  in biofilm versus compared to the  planktonic communities and vice versa. The most differentially abundanct OTUs when When  proportion means are were  calculated based on the environment type sample class (plantonic between plantonic  versus biofilm) were biofilm lifestyles the most  enriched OTUs were consistently  in planktonic samples (with respect to biofilm) (Figure 6). This is consistent with the higher alpha diversity in biofilm communities compared to planktonic communities. That is, communities and evidence that  sequence counts were spread across a greater diversty of taxa in the biofilm libraries compared to the planktonic libraries. libraries (i.e. biofilm communities had higher evenness than planktonic communities).  Of the top five environement type differentially abundant OTUs, enriched OTUs between the two lifestyles,  one is annotated as in the \textit{Bacteroidetes}, two \textit{Gammaproteobacteria}, one \textit{Betaproteobacteria} and one \textit{Alphaproteobacteria}; \textit{Alphaproteobacteria} and  all five are were  enriched in the planktonic liraries relative to biofilm. Table 1 lists biofilm (Table 1). Of  the top 25 enriched  OTUs ordered by the magnitude of our differential abundance metric. Only among lifestyles only  five bacterial OTU centroid sequences for the top 25 environment type enriched OTUs share shared  high sequence identity (>= 97\%) with cultured isolates (Table 1). The taxonomic composition of envirnoment type differentially abundant OTUs is qualitatively consistent with positions OTUs in the sample ordination space (see Figures 5 and 6). We similarly assessed membership among biofilm and plankton algal communities.  Algal 23S plastid rRNA gene sequence libraries also  clustered strongly by environment type lifestyle  (Figure 5). Biofilm libraries were predominantly enriched in \textit{Stramenopile} OTUs whereas planktonic libraries were enriched in \textit{Haptophyceae}, \textit{Cryptophyta} and \textit{Viridiplantae} OTUs based on OTU positions in sample space (Figure 5, see Ordination Methods). When algal OTUs are ordered by environment type sample class differential abundance (see Figure 6), 9 of the top 25 OTUs are enriched in the biofilm and 16 are enriched in the planktonic samples. Eight of these 9 biofilm enriched OTUs are \textit{Stramenopiles} of class \textit{Bacillarophyta}, the remaining OTU is classified as a member of the \textit{Rhodophyta}. The 16 plantonic enriched OTUs (above) are distributed into the \textit{Viridiplantae} (5 OTUs), \textit{Cryptophyta} (4 OTUs), \textit{Haptophyceae} (4 OTUs), and \textit{Stramenopiles} (3 OTUs). Nine of the top 10 environment type differentially abundant algal OTUs represent OTUs enriched in planktonic samples as opposed to biofilm. Environment type algal OTU mean ratios are qualitatively consistent with OTU positions in sample ordination space (see Figures 5 and 6) The separation in community membership among biofilm and planktonic communities is supported statistically by the Adonis test \cite{Anderson_2001} for both the bacterial and algal libraries (p-value 0.006 and 0.001, respectively). The environment type (biofilm or plankton) vector represents 18\% and 36\% of variance for pairwise sample distances in bacterial and algal libraries, respectively. The Adonis result is consistent with environment type (biofilm versus plantonic) clustering along the first principal component for the algal libraries but not for the bacterial libraries (Figure 5).