TY - JOUR T1 - Soil Protists in Three Neotropical Rainforests are Hyperdiverse and Dominated by Parasites JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/050997 SP - 050997 AU - Frédéric Mahé AU - Colomban de Vargas AU - David Bass AU - Lucas Czech AU - Alexandros Stamatakis AU - Enrique Lara AU - David Singer AU - Jordan Mayor AU - John Bunge AU - Sarah Sernaker AU - Tobias Siemensmeyer AU - Isabelle Trautmann AU - Sarah Romac AU - Cédric Berney AU - Alexey Kozlov AU - Edward A.D. Mitchell AU - Christophe V. W. Seppey AU - Elianne Egge AU - Guillaume Lentendu AU - Rainer Wirth AU - Gabriel Trueba AU - Micah Dunthorn Y1 - 2016/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/11/03/050997.abstract N2 - Animal and plant richness in tropical rainforests has long intrigued naturalist. More recent work has revealed that parasites contribute to high tropical tree diversity (Bagchi et al., 2014; Terborgh, 2012) and that arthropods are the most diverse eukaryotes in these forests (Erwin, 1982; Basset et al., 2012). It is unknown if similar patterns are reflected at the microbial scale with unicellular eukaryotes or protists. Here we show, using environmental metabarcoding and a novel phylogeny-aware cleaning step, that protists inhabiting Neotropical rainforest soils are hyperdiverse and dominated by the parasitic Apicomplexa, which infect arthropods and other animals. These host-specific protist parasites potentially contribute to the high animal diversity in the forests by reducing population growth in a density-dependent manner. By contrast, we found too few Oomycota to broadly drive high tropical tree diversity in a host-specific manner under the Janzen-Connell model (Janzen, 1970; Connell, 1970). Extremely high OTU diversity and high heterogeneity between samples within the same forests suggest that protists, not arthropods, are the most diverse eukaryotes in tropical rainforests. Our data show that microbes play a large role in tropical terrestrial ecosystems long viewed as being dominated by macro-organisms.Contact: dunthorn@rhrk.uni-kl.de ER -