RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Soil Protists in Three Neotropical Rainforests are Hyperdiverse and Dominated by Parasites JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 050997 DO 10.1101/050997 A1 Frédéric Mahé A1 Colomban de Vargas A1 David Bass A1 Lucas Czech A1 Alexandros Stamatakis A1 Enrique Lara A1 Jordan Mayor A1 John Bunge A1 Sarah Sernaker A1 Tobias Siemensmeyer A1 Isabelle Trautmann A1 Sarah Romac A1 Cédric Berney A1 Alexey Kozlov A1 Edward A. D. Mitchell A1 Christophe V.W. Seppey A1 David Singer A1 Elianne Egge A1 Rainer Wirth A1 Gabriel Trueba A1 Micah Dunthorn YR 2016 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/04/29/050997.abstract AB Although animals and plants in tropical rainforests are known to be hyperdiverse within and between communities, it is unknown if similar patterns are reflected at the microbial scale with unicellular eukaryotes or protists. Using environmental DNA sequencing of soils sampled in rainforests from Costa Rica, Panama, and Ecuador, we found that the Apicomplexa dominated the protist communities; these parasites potentially promote animal diversity in the forests by reducing population growth rates in a density-dependent manner similar to the Janzen-Connell hypothesis for tropical trees. Extremely high OTU diversity and high OTU turnover between samples within the same forests suggest that protists, not arthropods, are the most diverse eukaryotes in tropical rainforests, and that rainforest soil protists are at least as diverse, and potentially more diverse, than those in the marine plankton.