Microbial biogeography: the end of the ubiquitous dispersal hypothesis?

Ken Timmis is a difficult scientist to refuse when he asks you a favour.In his capacity as senior editor of the Environmental Microbiology journal, he asked me to write a research highlight on the paper by Ryšánek and colleagues (2014), which I had originally reviewed and made one of those very rare (for me) recommendations to 'accept as is'.In the paper, the authors examined the continental-scale spatial distributions of a single lineage of terrestrial protists within the genus Klebsormidium; using rbcL sequences to screen the isolated strains, which they asserted would provide better resolution than an internal transcribed spacer (ITS) targeted approach (Ryšánek et al., 2014).Interestingly, from a natural history perspective, they identified novel genotypes from the 190 Klebsormidium colonies isolated from their samples.In addition, and particularly fascinating to me, the authors presented strong evidence for both cosmopolitism and endemicity in terms of the biogeographical distribution across the Klebsormidium genotypes.Below, I set out a brief potted history on the rise of microbial biogeography in order to provide context on how this work, in my view, significantly contributes to our growing knowledge on this important fundamental subject.