Title |
Contrasting patterns of the bacterial and archaeal communities in a high-elevation river in northwestern China |
Author |
Yang Hu1,2, Jian Cai1,2, Chengrong Bai1,2, Keqiang Shao1, Xiangming Tang1, and Guang Gao1* |
Address |
1State Key Laboratory of Lake Science and Environment, Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing 210008, P. R. China, 2University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100000, P. R. China |
Bibliography |
Journal of Microbiology, 56(2),104–112, 2018,
|
DOI |
10.1007/s12275-018-7244-y
|
Key Words |
microbial community, high-elevation region, riverine
ecosystem, temperature, geographic distance |
Abstract |
The patterns of macrobiota in lotic ecosystems have been
extensively explored, however, the dynamics of microbiota
remain poorly investigated, especially in the high-elevation
region. To address this deficit, we collected eight samples to
unveil the bacterial and archaeal community in the Kaidu
river, located at the arid region of northwestern China (an
average of 2,500 m a.s.l.). For the bacterial community, phylogenetically
Betaproteobacteria prevailed, followed by Alphaproteobacteria
and Actinobacteria; at the finer genus level,
Limnohabitans and Variovorax were prominent. Along the
river, the bacterial community showed a continuous succession.
Specifically, their α- and β-diversity gradually increased,
suggesting a distance-decay pattern. Additionally, there was
an ecological transition between the dominant and the rare
sub-community along the river: the relative abundance of the
dominant members gradually decreased as the rare members
increased. We report that temperature and spatial distance
were significantly related to the variation of bacterial community.
Variance partitioning analysis showed that the environmental
factors contributed more to the bacterial community
than did the spatial distance. In the case of the archaeal
community, the methanogenic groups, mainly Methanosaeta
and Methanosarcina, were prominent within the Kaidu
river. Unlike the continuous change in the patterns of the
bacterial community, the archaeal community showed a constant
pattern along the river. Our results showed that the archaeal
community was independent of the environmental and
spatial factors. We propose that the inoculation of soil-derived
archaea is responsible for the archaeal community in
the Kaidu river. Together, our study demonstrated that the
bacterial community in the high-elevation Kaidu river is a
continuum, whereas the archaeal community is not. |