SynthesisProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2013
Marine bacteria exhibit a bipolar distribution.
Synthesis in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 73 papers.
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73 citing papers in PubMed.
- A horizontal connectivity mode in coastal oceans: transport overrides stratification to govern microbiome network stability.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2026Article
- Organic matter degradation by oceanic fungi differs between polar and non-polar waters.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Arctic Ocean virus communities and their seasonality, bipolarity, and prokaryotic associations.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Latitudinal gradients and ocean fronts strongly influence protist communities in the southern Pacific Ocean.FEMS microbiology ecology · 2024Article
- Disentangling drivers of mudflat intertidal DOM chemodiversity using ecological models.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Biogeographical and biodiversity patterns of planktonic microeukaryotes along the tropical western to eastern Pacific Ocean transect revealed by metabarcoding.Microbiology spectrum · 2024Article
- Decoding populations in the ocean microbiome.Microbiome · 2024Article
- Breaking the Ice: A Review of Phages in Polar Ecosystems.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2024Review
- Biofilm formation stabilizes metabolism in aApplied and environmental microbiology · 2023Article
- Fungal Diversity and Community Composition across Ecosystems.Journal of fungi (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Selection, drift and community interactions shape microbial biogeographic patterns in the Pacific Ocean.The ISME journal · 2022Article
- A ridge-to-reef ecosystem microbial census reveals environmental reservoirs for animal and plant microbiomes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Antibiotics and Carbohydrate-Containing Drugs Targeting Bacterial Cell Envelopes: An Overview.Pharmaceuticals (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
- Deep learning of a bacterial and archaeal universal language of life enables transfer learning and illuminates microbial dark matter.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Phylogenetic diversity and spatiotemporal dynamics of bacterial and microeukaryotic plankton communities in Gwangyang Bay of the Korean Peninsula.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Article
- Compendium of 530 metagenome-assembled bacterial and archaeal genomes from the polar Arctic Ocean.Nature microbiology · 2021Article
- Article
- Biogeographic traits of dimethyl sulfide and dimethylsulfoniopropionate cycling in polar oceans.Microbiome · 2021Article
- The biogeographic differentiation of algal microbiomes in the upper ocean from pole to pole.Nature communications · 2021Article
13 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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5 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
The microbial cosmopolitan dispersion hypothesis often invoked to explain distribution patterns driven by high connectivity of oceanographic water masses and widespread dispersal ability has never been rigorously tested. By using a global marine bacterial dataset and iterative matrix randomization simulation, we show that marine bacteria exhibit a significantly greater dispersal limitation than predicted by our null model using the "everything is everywhere" tenet with no dispersal limitation scenario. Specifically, marine bacteria displayed bipolar distributions (i.e., species occurring exclusively at both poles and nowhere else) significantly less often than in the null model. Furthermore, we observed fewer taxa present in both hemispheres but more taxa present only in a single hemisphere than expected under the null model. Each of these trends diverged further from the null expectation as the compared habitats became more geographically distant but more environmentally similar. Our meta-analysis supported a latitudinal gradient in bacterial diversity with higher richness at lower latitudes, but decreased richness toward the poles. Bacteria in the tropics also demonstrated narrower latitudinal ranges at lower latitudes and relatively larger ranges in higher latitudes, conforming to the controversial macroecological pattern of the "Rapoport rule." Collectively, our findings suggest that bacteria follow biogeographic patterns more typical of macroscopic organisms, and that dispersal limitation, not just environmental selection, likely plays an important role. Distributions of microbes that deliver critical ecosystem services, particularly those in polar regions, may be vulnerable to the same impacts that environmental stressors, climate warming, and degradation in habitat quality are having on biodiversity in animal and plant species.
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