Diversity and distribution of marine heterotrophic bacteria from a large culture collection
16 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables, supplementary information https://doi.org/10.1186/s12866-020-01884-7 ; Isolation of marine microorganisms is fundamental to gather information about their physiology, ecology and genomic content. To date, most of the bacterial isolation efforts have focused on the photic ocean leaving the deep ocean less explored. We have created a marine culture collection of heterotrophic bacteria (MARINHET) using a standard marine medium comprising a total of 1561 bacterial strains, and covering a variety of oceanographic regions from different seasons and years, from 2009 to 2015. Specifically, our marine collection contains isolates from both photic (817) and aphotic layers (744), including the mesopelagic (362) and the bathypelagic (382), from the North Western Mediterranean Sea, the North and South Atlantic Ocean, the Indian, the Pacific, and the Arctic Oceans. We described the taxonomy, the phylogenetic diversity and the biogeography of a fraction of the marine culturable microorganisms to enhance our knowledge about which heterotrophic marine isolates are recurrently retrieved across oceans and along different depths ; Projects Arctic Tipping Points (ATP, contract #226248), in the FP7 program of the European Union, and DOREMI (CTM2012–34294), from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, allowed the collection of samples from the Arctic and NW Mediterranean Sea, respectively. Research, including laboratory experiments and analyses, was mainly funded by grant BIOSENSOMICS "Convocatoria 2015 de ayudas Fundación BBVA a investigadores y creadores culturales" and, MAGGY, Plan Nacional I + D + I 2017 (CTM2017–87736-R), awarded to S.G.A. Analyses were also possible thank to the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) through baseline funding to C.M.D. and a subaward agreement OSR-2014-CC-1973-02 between KAUST and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). Additional funding for analyses and interpretation of the data was provided by projects REMEI (ref. CTM2015–70340-R) and MIAU-S3 (ref. RTI2018-101025-B-I00) from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness