Biology subjects

Touceda-Suarez, M.

Publications and source records attributed to Touceda-Suarez, M..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Soil viral response to drought disturbance and ecosystem recovery in an artificial rainforest

Anthropogenic climate change is driving increased temperature and altered precipitation patterns in tropical rainforests, yet the impact of severe drought on soil viral communities and their recovery capacity remains poorly understood. Soil viruses can exert strong controls on bacterial populations impacting microbially-mediated soil processes such as carbon cycling. At the same time, viruses are very sensitive to changes in the soil environment. We leverage meta-omics data from soils collected during a two-month drought and one-month recovery experiment carried in the Biosphere 2 Tropical Rainforest artificial biome. Our results indicate that soil viral community structure responds to small scale soil habitat heterogeneity more strongly than on overall changes in moisture. Additionally, the abundance of soil viruses was associated with a higher diversity of metabolites in the soil, suggesting viruses play a key role in soil biogeochemical processes. Altogether, our study suggests that soil viruses are an active part of tropical rainforest soil microbial communities and that is necessary to understand their response to drought.

microbiology↗

bioRxiv2025

Differences in the genomic potential of soil bacterial and viral communities between urban greenspaces and natural arid soils

Urban green spaces provide essential ecosystem services are ever more important in arid cities. However, the design and management of these greenspaces often require physicochemical transformations whose effect in the balance of the arid urban ecosystems is normally not accounted for. In this project, we leverage metagenomic data from soil microbial communities of urban greenspaces and neighboring natural areas in a city from the arid Southwestern USA (Tucson, Arizona) to understand the differences in microbial (bacterial and viral) community structure and function in urban greenspaces compared to natural arid soils. We found bacterial and viral communities to be distinct between urban greenspace and natural arid soils, viral communities showing a starker differentiation. Urban greenspace bacteria were less versatile and showed higher genetic potential for the simple carbohydrate consumption and nitrogen reduction. Moreover, bacteria in urban greenspaces exhibit higher genetic potential for resistance to heavy metals, and certain clinical antibiotics. Our results suggest that the conversion of arid natural land to urban greenspaces determines the soil microbiome structure and functioning, and potentially its ability to adapt to the changing environment. IMPORTANCEUrban green spaces are critical for the sustainability of arid cities. Nevertheless, they require deep soil physicochemical transformations. Soil bacterial and viral communities are responsible for soil functioning and provision of some ecosystem services, but they are also highly influenced by changes in the soil environment. The significance of our research is in illustrating the structural and functional changes that microbial and viral communities undergo in urban soils of arid cities, and their potential impacts on urban greenspace soil processes.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2019

Ancient genomic regulatory blocks are a major source for gene deserts in vertebrates after whole genome duplications

We investigated how the two rounds of whole genome duplication that occurred at the base of the vertebrate lineage have impacted ancient microsyntenic associations involving developmental regulators (known as genomic regulatory blocks, GRBs). We showed that the majority of GRBs present in the last common ancestor of chordates have been maintained as a single copy in humans. We found evidence that dismantling of the additional GRB copies occurred early in vertebrate evolution often through the differential retention of the regulatory gene but loss of the bystander genes exonic sequences. Despite the large evolutionary scale, the presence of duplicated highly conserved non-coding regions provided unambiguous proof for this scenario for dozens of ancient GRBs. Remarkably, the dismantling of ancient GRB duplicates has contributed to the creation of large gene deserts associated with regulatory genes in vertebrates, providing a widespread mechanism for the origin of these enigmatic genomic traits.

evolutionary biology↗