A new paper led by John Pearman (shown in picture below, on right) was recently published in Frontiers in Microbiology. It looks at the distribution patterns of bacteria in the water column of lakes in Aotearoa-New Zealand. You can read it here.
Samples were taken from the surface water of 167 lakes spread across Aotearoa-New Zealand. DNA was extracted from the water samples and bacterial DNA was amplified and sequenced.
Most of the diversity was rare with only a few amplicon sequence variants (ASVs; think of them as DNA species) were abundant across the lakes
Only a few ASVs had a wide distribution in the lakes with the majority being restricted to one or a few lakes.
Some ASVs had a restricted distribution in the sampling but had a relatively high abundance. A portion of these could be attributed to cyanobacteria and could indicate that cyanobacterial blooms, those occurrences that can stop swimming in the lakes, were present.
The distribution patterns for the abundant bacteria were more determined by changes in the environmental variables influencing the lake (e.g nutrients and temperature) and less with spatial dispersal limitations. However the rare bacteria were influenced to the same amount by spatial and environmental conditions.
