Nitrogen driven niche differentiation in bacterioplankton communities of northeast coastal Bay of Bengal

Abstract

The Bay of Bengal receives nitrogen inputs from multiple sources and the potential role of nitrogen-metabolizing microbial communities in the surface water is not well understood. The nitrogen budget estimate shows a deficit of 4.7 ± 2.4 Tg N yr-1, suggesting a significant role of dissolved organic nitrogen remineralization in fuelling ecosystem processes. Unravelling the process of remineralization leading to increasing concentrations of dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN) in coastal ecosystems such as in mangroves require a better understanding of the composition of functional resident bacterioplankton communities. Bacterioplankton communities were elucidated from eight stations along different estuaries spanning west to east of northeast coastal Bay of Bengal to understand the influence of DIN on shaping these communities. The eight stations were differentiated into ‘low’ and ‘high’ DIN stations based on DIN concentration, with five stations with High DIN concentration (>45 μM) and three stations with Low DIN concentration (<40μM). The V3–V4 region of 16S rRNA was amplified and sequenced to elucidate resident bacterioplankton community structure from environmental DNA. Proteobacteria, Bacteroidetes, and Firmicutes were the dominant bacterioplankton phyla across all stations. Nitrogen-fixing groups such as Nitrospirae, Lentisphaerae, Chloroflexi, and Planctomycetes make up about 1% of the bacterioplankton communities. Abundances of Spirochaetes and Tenericutes showed a positive correlation with DIN. Pseudomonadales, Alteromonadales, and Desulfovibrionales were found to distinctly vary in abundance between Low and High DIN stations. Predicted metagenomic profiles from taxonomically derived community structures indicated bacterial nitrate-nitrite reductase to be negatively correlated with prevalent DIN concentration in High DIN stations but positively correlated in Low DIN stations. This trend was also consistent for genes encoding for nitrate/nitrite response regulators and transporter proteins. This indicates the need to delineate functional bacterioplankton community structures to better understand their role in influencing rates and fluxes of nitrogen within mangroves.