Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-29-2020
Department
Department of Biological Sciences
Abstract
We conducted a global characterization of the microbial communities of shipping ports to serve as a novel system to investigate microbial biogeography. The community structures of port microbes from marine and freshwater habitats house relatively similar phyla, despite spanning large spatial scales. As part of this project, we collected 1,218 surface water samples from 604 locations across eight countries and three continents to catalogue a total of 20 shipping ports distributed across the East and West Coast of the United States, Europe, and Asia to represent the largest study of port-associated microbial communities to date. Here, we demonstrated the utility of machine learning to leverage this robust system to characterize microbial biogeography by identifying trends in biodiversity across broad spatial scales. We found that for geographic locations sharing similar environmental conditions, subpopulations from the dominant phyla of these habitats (
Publication Title
mSphere
Recommended Citation
Ghannam, R.,
Schaerer, L. G.,
Butler, T. M.,
&
Techtmann, S.
(2020).
Biogeographic Patterns in Members of Globally Distributed and Dominant Taxa Found in Port Microbial Communities..
mSphere,
5(1).
Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.mtu.edu/michigantech-p/1545
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Version
Publisher's PDF
Publisher's Statement
© 2020 Ghannam et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Publisher’s version of record: https://doi.org/10.1128/mSphere.00481-19