Browsing by Author "Hengst, Martha B."

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    CHANGES IN BACTERIAL COMMUNITY STRUCTURE ASSOCIATED WITH COASTAL COPPER ENRICHMENT
    (SOC ENVIRONMENTAL TOXICOLOGY & CHEMISTRY-SETAC, 2008) Moran, Ana C.; Hengst, Martha B.; De la Iglesia, Rodrigo; Andrade, Santiago; Correa, Juan A.; Gonzalez, Bernardo
    Marine bacterial communities isolated from the water column, sediment, the rock surface, and the green seaweed Ulva compressa were studied in an intertidal ecosystem. The study area included a coastal zone chronically affected by copper mine waste disposals. Bacterial community composition was analyzed by terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) of 16S rRNA genes, and multivariate analyses of T-RFLP data sets were used for comparisons. Results showed that diversity and richness indexes were not able to detect differences among compartments. However, comparisons within the same compartment clearly showed that copper enrichment was associated with changes in the composition of the bacterial communities and revealed that the magnitude of the effect depends on the compartment being considered. In this context, communities from sediments appeared as the most affected by copper enrichment. The present study also demonstrated that intertidal bacterial communities were dominated by Gammaproteobacteria, Firmicutes, and Actinobacteria and the changes in these communities were mainly due to changes in their relative abundances.
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    Early successional patterns of bacterial communities in soil microcosms reveal changes in bacterial community composition and network architecture, depending on the successional condition
    (2017) Rodriguez-Valdecantos, Gustavo; Manzano, Marlene; Sanchez, Raimundo; Urbina, Felipe; Hengst, Martha B.; Antonio Lardies, Marco; Ruz, Gonzalo A.; Gonzalez, Bernardo
    Soil ecosystem dynamics are influenced by the composition of bacterial communities and environmental conditions. A common approach to study bacterial successional dynamics is to survey the trajectories and patterns that follow bacterial community assemblages; however early successional stages have received little attention. To elucidate how soil type and chemical amendments influence both the trajectories that follow early compositional changes and the architecture of the community bacterial networks in soil bacterial succession, a time series experiment of soil microcosm experiments was performed. Soil bacterial communities were initially perturbed by dilution and subsequently subjected to three amendments: application of the pesticide 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid, as a pesticide-amended succession; application of cycloheximide, an inhibitor affecting primarily eukaryotic microorganisms, as a eukaryotic-inhibition bacterial succession; or application of sterile water as a non-perturbed control. Terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) analysis of the 16S rRNA gene isolated from soil microcosms was used to generate bacterial relative abundance datasets. Bray-Curtis similarity and beta diversity partition-based methods were applied to identify the trajectories that follow changes in bacterial community composition. Results demonstrated that bacterial communities exposed to these three conditions rapidly differentiated from the starting point (less than 12 h), followed different compositional change trajectories depending on the treatment, and quickly converged to a state similar to the initial community (48-72 h). Network inference analysis was applied using a generalized Lotka-Volterra model to provide an overview of bacterial OTU interactions and to follow the changes in bacterial community networks. This analysis revealed that antagonistic interactions increased when eukaryotes were inhibited, whereas cooperative interactions increased under pesticide influence. Moreover, central OTUs from soil bacterial community networks were also persistent OTUs, thus confirming the existence of a core bacterial community and that these same OTUs could plastically interact according to the perturbation type to quickly stabilize bacterial communities undergoing succession.