Abstract
Exploring the relationships between free-living (FL) and particle-attached (PA) bacterial communities can provide insight into their connectivity and the partitioning of biogeochemical processes, which is crucial to understanding the elemental cycles and metabolic pathways in aquatic ecosystems. However, there is still intense debate about that whether FL and PA fractions have the same assemblage. To address this issue, we investigated the extent of similarity between FL and PA bacterial communities along the environmental gradients in Lake Wuli, China. Our results revealed that the west Lake Wuli was slightly eutrophic and the east lake was moderately and highly eutrophic. The alpha-diversity of the FL bacterial communities was significantly lower than that of the PA fraction in the west lake, whereas the alpha-diversity of the two fractions was comparable in the east lake. The beta-diversity of both communities significantly differed in the west lake, whereas it resembled that in the east lake. Moreover, functional prediction analysis highlighted the significantly larger differences of metabolic functions between the FL and PA fractions in the west lake than in the east lake. Suspended particles and carbon resource promote the similarity between the FL and PA fractions. Collectively, our result reveals a convergent succession of aquatic communities along the eutrophic gradient, highlighting that the connectivity between FL and PA bacterial communities is nutrient related.
Highlights
Particles are crucial components in aquatic ecosystems (Simon et al, 2002), serving as pivotal energy sources for aquatic food webs and maintaining the nutrient budgets of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus (Sahoo et al, 2013)
Our results showed that the west lake and the east lake were distinct aquatic environments with statistically significant differences
Cluster analysis revealed that samples within the west lake and the east lake were separated from each other (Figure 2)
Summary
Particles are crucial components in aquatic ecosystems (Simon et al, 2002), serving as pivotal energy sources for aquatic food webs and maintaining the nutrient budgets of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus (Sahoo et al, 2013). Because the particle microenvironment contains elevated substrate concentrations, particles are “hot spots” for bacterial growth and transformation processes (Tang et al, 2010; Ortega-Retuerta et al, 2013). According to their distance to particles, the bacteria are divided into two groups: free-living (FL) bacteria and particle-attached (PA) bacteria (Crump et al, 1998, 1999). These results imply that, in aquatic ecosystems, the PA and FL bacterial communities are independent components of the aquatic bacterial assemblage
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