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Creators/Authors contains: "Li, Sixuan"

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  1. Wilkins, Laetitia G. (Ed.)
    Beneficial relationships between animals and microbial organisms (symbionts) are ubiquitous in nature. In the ocean, microbial symbionts are typically acquired from the environment and their composition across geographic locations is often shaped by adaptation to local habitat conditions. However, it is currently unknown how generalizable these patterns are across symbiotic systems that have contrasting ecological characteristics. To address this question, we compared symbiont population structure between deep-sea hydrothermal vent mussels and co-occurring but ecologically distinct snail species. Our analyses show that mussel symbiont populations are less partitioned by geography and do not demonstrate evidence for environmental adaptation. We posit that the mussel's mixotrophic feeding mode may lower its need to affiliate with locally adapted symbiont strains, while microhabitat stability and symbiont genomic mixing likely favors persistence of symbiont strains across geographic locations. Altogether, these findings further our understanding of the mechanisms shaping symbiont population structure in marine environmentally transmitted symbioses. 
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