¡Detective de ADN!
de los arrecifes coralinos
del POT de Panamá
​
Introduction to
Gracilaria chilensis
Gracilaria chilensis is a red, agarophyte algae, non-native to Chile (Guillemin et al., 2013, 2014). It is the main product of seaweed cultivation in Chile due to the demand for agar (Buschmann et al., 2008, 2017). Clonal propagation of ramets is the main cultivation method (Buschmann et al., 2001). Genetic evidence of an incipient domestication process in different populations of this algae has already been demonstrated (Guillemin et al., 2008). ​
In this work we examine the differences in the bacterial community living on Gracilaria chilensis, comparing cultivated and wild populations.
Taxonomic composition
Taxonomic assignments of the 12 most abundant amplification sequence variants (ASV).
Top 7 most abundant families.
Bacterial community of a cultivated red algae
A differentiated bacterial community is demonstrated for all algae samples when compared with environmental samples. In this algae bacterial community, clustering of wild and cultivated populations is observed.
Stress: 0.14
R2 = 0.99
p = 0.001
The common core
Indicator species Index analysis (IndVal) shows a major number of indicator ASVs for farm populations. That is, more amplification sequence variants specific to algae on cultivated populations. We believe this can be due to the acummulation of mutations in a more "stable" context for the bacteria.
grey: indval < 0.7
red & beige: indval > 0.7
The ecological core
The inference of covariance networks demonstrated the ocurrence of significant less covariances in the cultivated bacterial communities. This can be interpreted as a smaller number of bacteria - bacteria interactions in this communities, althought this statement has to be taken with caution.
Functional potential
We found a significantly smaller richness of metabolic pathways in cultivated communities. Linear discriminant analyisis shows enriched metabolic pathways for each population having more degradative pathways in wild populations and more abundant biosynthetic capacities in cultivated populations. top 25 more abundant metabolic pathways are listed in the final bubble plot to show the presence of pathways related to the degradation of sugars by bacteria, as well as the synthesis of aminoacids and pigments.
