Abstract
The study on sediments in the marginal basins of the Tibetan Plateau is of great significance for global climate change. The geological information of the Linxia Basin has been intensely investigated; however, the profiles of the microbial communities in this basin remain largely unknown. Here, based on the 16S rRNA high-throughput sequencing method, the bacterial community structure vertical succession is studied with different thicknesses of sedimentary samples. The bacterial community with a total of 1,729,658 paired reads distributed within 1,042 phylogenetic amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) from twenty sediments, and three surrounding soil samples were sequenced. First, high-throughput sequencing results highlight the surrounding soil sample bacterial community structures were significantly different from those recovered from the sediment samples. In addition, as observed in the PCoA and PERMANOVA, there is a dramatic change shift event of the community structure at M311. Our data suggest that shifts in relative abundances of the abundant taxa (˃1%) and the significant variations in the diversity of bacterial community implied community structure responses to changes in different sedimentary layers. Predicted community function changes demonstrate that the sediment bacterial community aerobic chemoheterotrophy has been significantly increased, and we believe that the possible influence of the lithofacies changes from the anaerobic system to the aerobic environment, possibly accompanied by the significant uplift of the plateau that has previously been associated with enhanced aridity in Central Asia at ∼8 Ma. Taken together, these results illustrate the potential for the microbial community as a biological indicator in sediment ecosystems to reconstruct paleoenvironments.
Highlights
Microorganisms play key ecological roles in the process of geological and climate change
This study focuses on the microbial community structure and function from different stratigraphy sediment samples, in hopes of revealing the bacterial community evolution characteristics and the potential for the microbial community as a biological indicator in sediment ecosystems to reconstruct paleoenvironments
The contents of total organic carbon (TOC) in the soil samples were higher than 1%, while those were less than 0.1% in the sediment samples, indicating the organic matter content in the sediment samples is very low
Summary
Microorganisms play key ecological roles in the process of geological and climate change. With the rapid development of modern molecular microbiology, we are able to study the abundance, distribution, and types of microorganisms in various extreme environments (Bard et al, 1997; Hofman et al, 2015). Scientists use these new methods to study microbes in modern environments and microbes in ancient rocks, such as microbial ancient DNA (Coolen et al, 2005; Coolen et al, 2006). Recent research studies showed ancient DNA preserved in Qinghai Lake sediments was used to reconstruct the temporal succession of plankton communities in the past 18,500 years (Li et al, 2016). The characteristics of climate change, the understanding of the continuous acquisition of fine molecular-level organic components, and the recording of large-scale environmental regional changes in climate characteristics and other scientific issues could be answered with a combination of interpretation from microbiology study (Coolen et al, 2004; 2013; Cao et al, 2017; Han et al, 2017)
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