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Hypolithic and soil microbial community assembly along an aridity gradient in the Namib Desert

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Abstract

The Namib Desert is considered the oldest desert in the world and hyperarid for the last 5 million years. However, the environmental buffering provided by quartz and other translucent rocks supports extensive hypolithic microbial communities. In this study, open soil and hypolithic microbial communities have been investigated along an East–West transect characterized by an inverse fog-rainfall gradient. Multivariate analysis showed that structurally different microbial communities occur in soil and in hypolithic zones. Using variation partitioning, we found that hypolithic communities exhibited a fog-related distribution as indicated by the significant East–West clustering. Sodium content was also an important environmental factor affecting the composition of both soil and hypolithic microbial communities. Finally, although null models for patterns in microbial communities were not supported by experimental data, the amount of unexplained variation (68–97 %) suggests that stochastic processes also play a role in the assembly of such communities in the Namib Desert.

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Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge F.D. Eckardt for providing Fig. 1a, and the National Research Foundation (South Africa) for support of this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Microbial Biotechnology and Metagenomics (IMBM), University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa

    Francesca Stomeo, Angel Valverde, Marla I. Tuffin & Don A. Cowan

  2. School of Applied Sciences, Auckland University of Technology, Private Bag 92006, Auckland, 1142, New Zealand

    Stephen B. Pointing

  3. NASA-Ames Research Center, MS 245-3, Moffett Field, CA, 94035, USA

    Christopher P. McKay & Kimberley A. Warren-Rhodes

  4. Desert Research Foundation of Namibia, P.O. Box 20232, Windhoek, Namibia

    Mary Seely

  5. Department of Genetics, Centre for Microbial Ecology and Genomics (CMEG), University of Pretoria, Pretoria, 0002, South Africa

    Angel Valverde & Don A. Cowan

  6. Biosciences eastern and central Africa (BecA), International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) Hub, P.O. Box 30709, Nairobi, 00100, Kenya

    Francesca Stomeo

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  1. Francesca Stomeo
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  2. Angel Valverde
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  5. Kimberley A. Warren-Rhodes
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  6. Marla I. Tuffin
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  8. Don A. Cowan
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Don A. Cowan.

Additional information

Communicated by A. Oren.

F. Stomeo and A. Valverde contributed equally to this work.

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Stomeo, F., Valverde, A., Pointing, S.B. et al. Hypolithic and soil microbial community assembly along an aridity gradient in the Namib Desert. Extremophiles 17, 329–337 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00792-013-0519-7

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