The Overlooked Genetic Diversity in the Dryland Soil Surface-Dwelling Cyanobacterium Nostoc flagelliforme as Revealed by
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NOTES AND SHORT COMMUNICATIONS
The Overlooked Genetic Diversity in the Dryland Soil Surface-Dwelling Cyanobacterium Nostoc flagelliforme as Revealed by the Marker Gene wspA Xiang Gao 1,2
&
Haiyan Xu 2 & Xiaolong Yuan 1
Received: 10 August 2020 / Accepted: 21 September 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Biodiversity is recognized to be relatively low in the dryland ecosystem. However, we might overlook the accumulating genetic variation in those dryland micro-populations, which should eventually increase the dryland biodiversity. In the xeric steppes of western and northwestern China, there are two soil surface-dwelling and genetically close cyanobacterial species, Nostoc commune and Nostoc flagelliforme. They respectively exhibit lamellate and filamentous colony shapes. Their individual colony is consisted of hundreds of trichomes and the common exopolysaccharide matrix. N. flagelliforme is exclusively distributed in the dryland and supposed to be evolved from N. commune. We previously reported that the morphological diversity of N. flagelliforme colonies was very limited, being either cylindrical or strip-like. In this communication, we performed singlenucleotide polymorphism (SNP) analysis of the marker gene wspA as well as phylogenetic analysis of the WspA protein in N. flagelliforme colonies to gain insights into its genetic diversity. SNP analysis suggested that there existed plentiful nucleotide variations in the individual colonies and meanwhile these variations shared certain evolutionary regularity. Phylogenetic analysis of the deduced proteins from the cloned wspA sequences suggested that the relatively regular variations were possibly dispersed in the N. flagelliforme populations of different regions. Thus, these results presented a scenario of the underestimated genetic diversity hidden behind the limited morphotype of dryland cyanobacteria. Maybe, we can consider the individual cyanobacterial colony as a potential biodiversity pool in the drylands. Keywords Terrestrial cyanobacteria . Nostoc flagelliforme . Filamentous colonies . Genetic diversity . Drylands
Drylands cover about 40% of the earth’s total land surface, where cyanobacteria play a crucial role in carbon or nitrogen fixation for sustaining microbial and plant communities [1]. Dryland cyanobacteria can be divided into at least two groups: those in biological soil crusts, acting as the dominant species in the complex consortia [2, 3], and those presenting as macroscopic colonial forms, such as Nostoc commune and Nostoc
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-020-01610-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Xiang Gao [email protected] 1
School of Food and Biological Engineering, Shaanxi University of Science and Technology, Xi’an 710021, China
2
School of Life Sciences, Central China Normal University, Wuhan 430079, China
flagelliforme [4, 5]. N. commune is a cosmopolitan species with
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