Establishment of microbial strains from the river, groundwater, and soil in the hyporheic zone is limited despite connectivity

Abstract

Microbial diversity across ecosystems may be impacted by dispersal pathways and selection due to physiochemical conditions, and so it is hard to predict the extent of strain sharing across heterogeneous environmental compartments. Evaluation of patterns of strain-level overlap requires genome-level comparisons using extensive datasets collected over large spatial scales. Here, we sampled microbiomes beneath (hyporheic zone) and within the East River (Colorado, USA) and found little or no strain overlap at sites along the river corridor, despite connection by river flow, suggesting selection due to the local environment. Comparisons involving microbiomes from hillslopes and riparian zone soil yielded essentially no strain-level overlap with the microbiomes of river and hyporheic zones. We also sampled a nearby groundwater well and found near-perfect genotypic overlap with strains in one hyporheic zone location that exhibited active groundwater upwelling. Given an absence of direct connectivity between these two locations via discrete hydrologic flow paths, we conclude that groundwater strains are widely dispersed in the aquifer. As hyporheic zone microbiomes in zones with low river flow share no strains with groundwater microbiomes, we infer that strains introduced by groundwater mixing in the hyporheic zone are transitory. We conclude that despite evidence for mixing of river-and-hyporheic zone water, and river-and-groundwater on short time scales, establishment of transported strains in the hyporheic zone is minimal.