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. 2021 Apr 23;4:501. doi: 10.1038/s42003-021-02012-5

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© The Author(s) 2021

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Fig. 3 — a Dendrogram cluster showing the similarity (Jaccard index) of heterotrophic protist communities of the 27 sediment samples in regard to species richness based on incidence-based data (presence/absence) using UPGMA clustering. The five clusters are supported by moderate to high bootstrap values. Multiple sediment samples were analyzed separately at stations marked with an asterisk for the investigation of small-scale distribution patterns. b Relative proportion of OTUs within the 27 deep-sea sediment samples related to the major taxonomic protist groups. Taxonomic groups (corresponding to division level in the PR2 database classification) are only separately shown, when the number of OTUs reached more than 1% within each sample. Otherwise, OTUs were clustered together into “Others”. “Unknown/Uncertain” OTUs have been either assigned to several taxonomic division levels or to sequences taxonomically assigned only to Eukaryota. c Relative proportion of shared (0.6%) and unique (57.6%) OTUs (heterotrophic protist richness) within all 27 sediment samples (obtained from 20 deep-sea stations). d Hypothetical deep-sea food web illustrating the generally ignored complex trophic interactions between microbial and macrobial components derived from their molecular diversity. Highly diverse and abundant protists are embedded in deep-sea food webs on different trophic levels as feeders on prokaryotes and particulate and dissolved organic matter, as predators, as well as parasites of metazoans and protists.