A shared core microbiome in soda lakes separated by large distances

Abstract

In alkaline soda lakes, high concentrations of dissolved carbonates establish an environment favouring productive phototrophic microbial mat communities. Here we show how different species of microbial phototrophs and autotrophs contribute to this exceptional productivity. Four years of amplicon and shotgun DNA sequencing data from microbial mats from four different lakes indicated the presence of over 2,000 different species of Bacteria and Eukaryotes. Metagenome-assembled-genomes were obtained for a core microbiome of 8,000 km apart. We present evidence for (very rare) dispersion of some core microbiome members from Canadian mats to Central Asian soda lake sediments. The close similarity between distant microbial communities indicates that these communities share common design principles, that reproducibly lead to a high and robust productivity. We unravel a few examples of such principles and speculate that these might be applied to create robust biotechnology for carbon dioxide conversion, to mitigate of global climate change.