bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.15.950717; this version posted February 15, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. 1 Nutrient parsimony shapes diversity and functionality in hyper-oligotrophic Antarctic 2 soils 3 4 Running title: Effects of nutrient stoichiometry in Antarctic soils 5 6 Authors: Marc W. Van Goethem1§, Surendra Vikram1, David W. Hopkins2, Grant Hall3, Stephan 7 Woodborne3,4, Thomas J. Aspray5, Ian D. Hogg6, Don A. Cowan1 and Thulani P. 8 Makhalanyane1* 9 10 Affiliations: 11 1.Centre for Microbial Ecology and Genomics, Department of Biochemistry, Genetics and 12 Microbiology, University of Pretoria, Pretoria 0028, South Africa 13 2. Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC), West Mains Road, Edinburgh, EH9 3JG, United Kingdom 14 3. Mammal Research Institute, University of Pretoria, Private Bag X20, Hatfield, 0028, South 15 Africa 4. iThemba LABS, Private Bag 11, WITS, 2050, South Africa 16 5. School of Energy, Geoscience, Infrastructure and Society, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, 17 EH14 4AS, United Kingdom 18 6. University of Waikato, New Zealand 19 § Present address: Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology Division, Lawrence Berkeley 20 National Laboratory, 1 Cyclotron Rd, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA 21 22 *Corresponding author: Dr Thulani P. Makhalanyane 23 Email:
[email protected] 24 25 Conflict of Interest: The authors declare they have no conflict of interest. 26 Funding Sources: This work was supported by the South African National Antarctic Program 27 funding instrument of the National Research Foundation.