Abstract
In river-lake systems, sediment and water column are two distinct habitats harboring different bacterial communities which play a crucial role in biogeochemical processes. In this study, we employed Phylogenetic Investigation of Communities by Reconstruction of Unobserved States to assess the potential functions and functional redundancy of the bacterial communities in sediment and water in a eutrophic river-lake ecosystem, Poyang Lake in China. Bacterial communities in sediment and water had distinct potential functions of carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur metabolisms as well as phosphorus cycle, while the differences between rivers and the lake were inconspicuous. Bacterial communities in sediment had a higher relative abundance of genes associated with carbohydrate metabolism, carbon fixation pathways in prokaryotes, methane metabolism, anammox, nitrogen fixation, and dissimilatory sulfate reduction than that of water column. Bacterial communities in water column were higher in lipid metabolism, assimilatory nitrate reduction, dissimilatory nitrate reduction, phosphonate degradation, and assimilatory sulfate reduction than that of sediment bacterial communities. Furthermore, the variations in functional composition were closely associated to the variations in taxonomic composition in both habitats. In general, the bacterial communities in water column had a lower functional redundancy than in sediment. Moreover, comparing to the overall functions, bacterial communities had a lower functional redundancy of nitrogen metabolism and phosphorus cycle in water column and lower functional redundancy of nitrogen metabolism in sediment. Distance-based redundancy analysis and mantel test revealed close correlations between nutrient factors and functional compositions. The results suggested that bacterial communities in this eutrophic river-lake system of Poyang Lake were vulnerable to nutrient perturbations, especially the bacterial communities in water column. The results enriched our understanding of the bacterial communities and major biogeochemical processes in the eutrophic river-lake ecosystems.
Highlights
Lakes and their tributaries are highly linked ecosystems in multiple ways, especially through materials transported from the watershed to the lake through river systems (Cole et al, 2006; Marcarelli & Wurtsbaugh, 2009; Jones, 2010; Ylla et al, 2013)
Functional differences In total, 6,295 and 6,187 KOs were detected in bacterial communities in sediment and water column
non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) and ADONIS showed that bacterial communities in LS and RS were significantly (P < 0.05) different to LW and RW (LS vs. LW and RS vs. RW), respectively (Fig. 2)
Summary
Lakes and their tributaries are highly linked ecosystems in multiple ways, especially through materials transported from the watershed to the lake through river systems (Cole et al, 2006; Marcarelli & Wurtsbaugh, 2009; Jones, 2010; Ylla et al, 2013). Microbial communities in lake and its tributaries have different taxonomic compositions (Ren et al, 2017a, 2019). Water and sediment are two distinct realms and interact closely through biogeochemical processes (Parker et al, 2016) These two habitats host tremendous diversity of microorganisms (Lozupone & Knight, 2007; Röeske et al, 2012; Huang et al, 2016), which constitute distinct microbial communities in sediment and water column (Briée, Moreira & López-García, 2007; Nishihama et al, 2008; Ren et al, 2019). The functional differences of bacterial communities in sediment and water column of lake-river systems were not well studied. The relationships between taxonomic and functional differences can help to elucidate functional redundancy and stability of bacterial communities
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