4.6 Article

Freshwater protists: unveiling the unexplored in a large floodplain system

Journal

ENVIRONMENTAL MICROBIOLOGY
Volume 24, Issue 4, Pages 1731-1745

Publisher

WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/1462-2920.15838

Keywords

-

Categories

Funding

  1. Agencia Nacional de Promocion Cientifica y Tecnologica [PICT 2016-0465]
  2. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas (CONICET)
  3. Region Bretagne fellowship [1537]
  4. project 'Atraccion de talento investigador' [AMB-5210]
  5. Spanish Government [PGC2018-094660-B-I00]

Ask authors/readers for more resources

This study surveyed the protist diversity of the Parana River using metabarcoding, and found that approximately 28% of the amplicon sequence variants were classified as novel, mostly related to heterotrophic groups traditionally overlooked in freshwater systems. In addition, new deep-branching cluster sequences were identified within both well-documented and less studied groups, highlighting the lack of knowledge on freshwater planktonic protists.
Protists play a fundamental role in all ecosystems, but we are still far from estimating the total diversity of many lineages, in particular in highly diverse environments, such as freshwater. Here, we survey the protist diversity of the Parana River using metabarcoding, and we applied an approach that includes sequence similarity and phylogeny to evaluate the degree of genetic novelty of the protists' communities against the sequences described in the reference database PR2. We observed that similar to 28% of the amplicon sequence variants were classified as novel according to their similarity with sequences from the reference database; most of them were related to heterotrophic groups traditionally overlooked in freshwater systems. This lack of knowledge extended to those groups within the green algae (Archaeplastida) that are well documented such as Mamiellophyceae, and also to the less studied Pedinophyceae, for which we found sequences representing novel deep-branching clusters. Among the groups with potential novel protists, Bicosoecida (Stramenopiles) were the best represented, followed by Codosiga (Opisthokonta), and the Perkinsea (Alveolata). This illustrates the lack of knowledge on freshwater planktonic protists and also the need for isolation and/or cultivation of new organisms to better understand their role in ecosystem functioning.

Authors

I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.

Reviews

Primary Rating

4.6
Not enough ratings

Secondary Ratings

Novelty
-
Significance
-
Scientific rigor
-
Rate this paper

Recommended

No Data Available
No Data Available