Long-term effects of ocean warming on vibrios

Vibrios are a major source of human disease, play an important role in the ecology and health of marine animals and are regarded as an abundant fraction of culturable bacteria of the ocean. There has been a considerable global effort to reduce the risk of Vibrio infections and yet in most countries both human and non-human illnesses associated with these bacteria are increasing. The cause of this increase is not known, but since vibrios are strongly thermodependant there is good reason to believe that global warming may have contributed. To investigate this possibility we examined historical samples from the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) archive using advanced molecular analysis and pyrosequencing. For the first time we were able to recover environmental DNA from CPR samples that had been stored for up to ~50 years in a formalin-fixed format, which is suitable for molecular analyses of the associated prokaryotic community. To overcome the problem of DNA degradation due to the sample age and storage in formalin we develop an unbiased index of abundance for Vibrio quantification in CPR samples termed a 'relative Vibrio Abundance Index' (VAI). VAI is defined as the ratio of Vibrio spp. cells to total bacterial cells assessed by Real-Time PCR using genus-specific and universal primers, respectively, producing small amplicons of similar size (~100bp). We assessed VAI index on 55 samples (each representing 10 nautical miles tow equal to 3 m3 of filtered sewater) collected in August by the CPR survey in the North Sea from off the Rhine and Humber estuaries between 1961 to 2005 showing that the genus Vibrio has increased in prevalence in the last 44 years and that this increase is correlated significantly, during the same period, with warming sea surface temperature. In addition, by applying deep sequencing analysis of a subset of these samples we provide evidence that bacteria belonging to the genus Vibrio, including the human pathogen V. cholerae, not only increased in occurrence over the last half century in the southern North Sea, but also prevailed within the particle associated bacterial community of coastal marine waters. These findings provide support for the view that global warming may have a strong impact on the composition of marine bacterial communities with important implications for human and animal health into the future.