TY - JOUR T1 - Habitat diversification promotes environmental selection in planktonic prokaryotes and ecological drift in microbial eukaryotes JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/161091 SP - 161091 AU - Ramiro Logares AU - Sylvie V. M. Tesson AU - Björn Canbäck AU - Mikael Pontarp AU - Katarina Hedlund AU - Karin Rengefors Y1 - 2017/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/07/09/161091.abstract N2 - Whether or not communities of microbial eukaryotes are structured in the same way as prokaryotes is a basic and poorly explored question in ecology. Here we investigated this question in a set of planktonic lake microbiotas in Eastern Antarctica that represent a natural community ecology experiment. Most of the analysed lakes emerged from the sea during the last 6,000 years, giving rise to waterbodies that originally contained marine microbiotas and that subsequently evolved into habitats ranging from freshwater to hypersaline. We show that habitat diversification has promoted environmental selection driven by a salinity gradient in prokaryotes and ecological drift in microeukaryotes. Nevertheless, we detected also a number of microeukaryotes with specific responses to salinity, indicating that albeit minor, environmental selection has had a role in the assembly of their communities. Altogether, we conclude that habitat diversification can promote contrasting responses in planktonic microeukaryotes and prokaryotes belonging to the same communities. ER -