(American Society for Microbiology, 2011) Mushegian, Alexandra Arcadievna; Peterson, Celeste; Baker, Chris; Pringle, Anne E.
Symbioses are unique habitats for bacteria. We surveyed the spatial diversity of bacterial communities across multiple individuals of closely related lichens using terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) and pyrosequencing. Centers of lichens house richer, more consistent assemblages than species-poor and compositionally disparate lichen edges, suggesting that ecological succession plays a role in structuring these communities.
