Mutual environmental drivers of the community composition, functional attributes and co-occurrence patterns of bacterioplankton in the composite aquatic ecosystem of Taihu watershed in China

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This study aimed to determine the environmental and ecological factors influencing the planktonic prokaryotic community profiles in the composite ecosystem comprising Taihu Lake, Taipu River, and Jinze Reservoir in the Taihu Watershed in China. A total of 42 water samples were intermittently collected from different sites in six months across four seasons. Physicochemical characteristics of the ecosystem, bacterioplankton diversity, and composition, the presence of co-occurrence patterns, and environmental predictors of ecological modules in the bacterioplankton network were determined. The central species played a more important role in regulating the structure and function of the bacterioplankton community and in responding to environmental contamination than the entire community. The relative abundance of the phylum Proteobacteria and the class Betaproteobacteria varied significantly between months and locations, which were identified as core functional taxa. A nonrandom co-occurrence pattern and function-driven modular structure were observed in the bacterioplankton co-occurrence network. Dissolved oxygen and ammonium nitrogen were the major and mutual environmental predictors of the bacterioplankton community composition, functional attributes, and relative abundance of ecological modules. The results improve our understanding of the impact of anthropogenic contamination on bacterioplankton diversity and biogeochemical cycles and the formulation of strategies for bioremediation of the Taihu Watershed.</jats:p>

Microbial co-occurrence networks as a biomonitoring tool for aquatic environments: a review

“…The different modules performed various functions, for example, the first module was attributed to have four functions: methanotrophy, aerobic ammonia oxidation, nitrification and ureolysis; the second module had functional groups related to metabolism and human health; and the third module had an association with chlorate reduction, methanol oxidation and methylotrophy. Hereby, clearly demonstrating that in this case, functional groups were linked by ecological associations (Liu et al 2020a). The analysis of microbial networks can be coupled with specific functions, which allows us to have a general understanding of the microbial phylogenetic distribution, their correlations, and their collective functions (Bohan et al 2017).…”

“…Hence it has been suggested that the structural modularity of a network may also reflect the stability and resilience of the system (Pavlopoulos et al 2011;Deng et al 2012;Delmas et al 2019;Di Battista et al 2020). In planktonic prokaryotic community profiles from the Taihu Watershed in China, the co-occurrence network was grouped into four major ecological modules where the OTU nodes had a robust co-occurrence correlation (Liu et al 2020a). The different modules performed various functions, for example, the first module was attributed to have four functions: methanotrophy, aerobic ammonia oxidation, nitrification and ureolysis; the second module had functional groups related to metabolism and human health; and the third module had an association with chlorate reduction, methanol oxidation and methylotrophy.…”

Community Assembly and Co-occurrence Patterns Underlying the Core and Satellite Bacterial Sub-communities in the Tibetan Lakes

“…Microorganisms with microscopic sizes and high dispersal capacity could display complex interaction webs within an ecological niche, which are also key to maintaining microbial community structure ( Faust and Raes, 2012 ). Co-occurrence network analysis provides powerful support for revealing the complex microbial community structure and interactions among microorganisms, which could reflect shared niches among community members in the real world ( Faust and Raes, 2012 ; Mikhailov et al, 2019 ; Mingkun et al, 2020 ). Hu et al (2017b) demonstrated that due to different ecological niches, core and satellite sub-communities play different roles in the co-occurrence network and have different network topological characteristics.…”

Diversity and assembly of active bacteria and their potential function along soil aggregates in a paddy field

“…Raw fastq files were quality-filtered using Trimmomatic and merged using FLASH as described previously (Liu et al, 2020b). Operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were clustered using UPARSE (version 10 http://drive5.com/uparse/) with a similarity cutoff of 97%.…”