Phylogenetic relatedness drives protists assembly in marine and terrestrial environments

Aim: Assembly of protists communities is known to be driven mainly by environmental filtering, but the imprint of phylogenetic relatedness is unknown. In this study, we aim to test the degree at which co-occurrences and co-exclusions of protists in different phylogenetic relatedness classes are deviating from random expectation in two ecosystems in order to link them to ecological processes.

Location: Global open-oceans and Neotropical rainforest soils

Major taxa: Protists

Time period: 2009-2013

Methods: Protist metabarcoding data originated from two large scale studies. Co-occurrence and co-exclusion networks were constructed using a recent method combining a null distribution model with Spearman’s rank correlation coefficients among pairs of OTU. Phylogenetic relatedness was estimated using either global pairwise sequence distance or phylogenetic distance inferred from best maximum-likelihood trees derived from multiple alignments of OTU representative sequences. Significa...