Rock varnish is a thin layer of Fe and Mn oxyhydroxides with embedded clay minerals that contain an increased Mn/Fe ratio compared to that of the Earth's crust. Even if the study of rock varnish has important implications in several fields, the composition of epilithic bacterial communities and the distribution of taxa on varnish surfaces are still not wholly described. The aim of this study was (i) to identify the bacterial taxa which show the greatest variation between varnish and non-varnish environments, collected from the same rock, and (ii) to describe the morphology of epilithic communities through scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Triplicate samples of rock surfaces with varnish and triplicate samples without varnish were collected from five sites in Matsch Valley (South Tyrol, Italy). The V4 region of 16S rRNA gene was analyzed by Illumina sequencing. Fifty-five ubiquitous taxa have been examined to assess variation between varnish and non-varnish. Cyanobacteria, Chloroflexi, Proteobacteria along with minor taxa such as Solirubrobacterales, Conexibaxter, and Rhodopila showed significant variations of abundance, diversity, or both responding to the ecology (presence/absence of varnish). Other taxa, such as the genus Edaphobacter, showed a more marked spatial variation responding to the sampling site. SEM images showed a multitude of bacterial morphologies and structures involved in the process of attachment and creation of a suitable environment for growth. The features emerging from this analysis suggest that the highly oxidative Fe and Mn-rich varnish environment favors anoxigenic autotrophy and establishment of highly specialized bacteria.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 8. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 19 January 2022.
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Outputs of similar age from Microbial Ecology
#3
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Altmetric has tracked 28,731,329 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done well and is in the 81st percentile: it's in the top 25% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 2,370 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a little more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 5.6. This one has done well, scoring higher than 82% of its peers.
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