Halophilic microbial community compositional shift after a rare rainfall in the Atacama Desert
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2019
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Understanding the mechanisms underlying microbial resistance and resilience to perturbations is essential to predict the
impact of climate change on Earth’s ecosystems. However, the resilience and adaptation mechanisms of microbial
communities to natural perturbations remain relatively unexplored, particularly in extreme environments. The response of an
extremophile community inhabiting halite (salt rocks) in the Atacama Desert to a catastrophic rainfall provided the
opportunity to characterize and de-convolute the temporal response of a highly specialized community to a major
disturbance. With shotgun metagenomic sequencing, we investigated the halite microbiome taxonomic composition and
functional potential over a 4-year longitudinal study, uncovering the dynamics of the initial response and of the recovery of
the community after a rainfall event. The observed changes can be recapitulated by two general modes of community shifts
—a rapid Type 1 shift and a more gradual Type 2 adjustment. In the initial response, the community entered an unstable
intermediate state after stochastic niche re-colonization, resulting in broad predicted protein adaptations to increased water
availability. In contrast, during recovery, the community returned to its former functional potential by a gradual shift in
abundances of the newly acquired taxa. The general characterization and proposed quantitation of these two modes of
community response could potentially be applied to other ecosystems, providing a theoretical framework for prediction of
taxonomic and functional flux following environmental changes.