ArticleFrontiers in microbiology2020
Environmental Factors Driving Spatial Heterogeneity in Desert Halophile Microbial Communities.
Article in Frontiers in microbiology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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12 citing papers in PubMed, 17 citations in OpenAlex.
- Change of the active bacteria mediating HCOiScience · 2026Article
- Evaluating the role of microplastics and wastewater in shaping Vibrio spp. and antibiotic resistance gene abundance in urban freshwaters.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Spatial Heterogeneity in Soil Microbial Communities Impacts Their Suitability as Bioindicators for Evaluating Productivity in Agricultural Practices.Microorganisms · 2025Article
- Dryland fungi are spatially heterogeneous and resistant to global change drivers.Ecosphere (Washington, D.C) · 2024Article
- Exploring the prokaryote-eukaryote interplay in microbial mats from an Andean athalassohaline wetland.Microbiology spectrum · 2024Article
- The Atacama Rover Astrobiology Drilling Studies (ARADS) Project.Astrobiology · 2023Article
- 'Follow the Water': Microbial Water Acquisition in Desert Soils.Microorganisms · 2023Review
- Adaptations of endolithic communities to abrupt environmental changes in a hyper-arid desert.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Article
- Adaptation of Cyanobacteria to the Endolithic Light Spectrum in Hyper-Arid Deserts.Microorganisms · 2022Article
- Response of soil microbial compositional and functional heterogeneity to grazing exclusion in alpine shrub and meadows in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.Frontiers in microbiology · 2022Article
- Identification of bacterial communities in extreme sites of Pakistan using high throughput barcoded amplicon sequencing.Biodiversity data journal · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Spatial heterogeneity in microbial communities is observed in all natural ecosystems and can stem from both adaptations to local environmental conditions as well as stochastic processes. Extremophile microbial communities inhabiting evaporitic halite nodules (salt rocks) in the Atacama Desert, Chile, are a good model ecosystem for investigating factors leading to microbiome heterogeneity, due to their diverse taxonomic composition and the spatial segregation of individual nodules. We investigated the abiotic factors governing microbiome composition across different spatial scales, allowing for insight into the factors that govern halite colonization from regional desert-wide scales to micro-scales within individual nodules. We found that water availability and community drift account for microbiome assembly differently at different distance scales, with higher rates of cell dispersion at the smaller scales resulting in a more homogenous composition. This trend likely applies to other endoliths, and to non-desert communities, where dispersion between communities is limited. At the intra-nodule scales, a light availability gradient was most important in determining the distribution of microbial taxa despite intermixing by water displacement via capillary action.
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