We investigated spatial variations of the bacterial and archaeal community composition in surface waters of the Sea of Okhotsk during summer of 2006, using denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE). We determined phylogenetic assemblages, including Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Cyanobacteria, Alpha-and Gammaproteobacteria, and Marine Group II Euryarchaea, and successfully revealed their spatial distribution patterns. At most stations, Bacteria had higher diversity than Archaea, indicated by the relatively higher Shannon-Weaver indexes and numbers of operational taxonomic units (OTUs). Canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) and redundancy analysis (RDA) demonstrated that the community compositions of bacterial populations in the Sea of Okhotsk were closely associated with total prokaryote abundance, while the spatial distributions of bacterial phylogenetic groups were more related to both the concentration of dissolved organic nitrogen (DON) and the ratio of DON versus dissolved organic carbon concentration (DOC:DON). On the other hand, the spatial variation of the community composition of Archaea had no significant association with environmental parameters.KEY WORDS: Phylogenetic diversity · Bacteria · Archaea · Okhotsk Sea · Canonical correspondence analysis · CCA · Redundancy analysis · RDA : 191-204, 2010 considerable functional and biogeochemical diversity within the chemoautotrophic (Wuchter et al. 2003) and heterotrophic (Ouverney & Fuhrman 2000, Teira et al. 2004) planktonic marine Archaea have been revealed.
Resale or republication not permitted without written consent of the publisherAquat Microb Ecol 61Although there is a growing number of studies investigating microbial diversity and composition in various oceanic regions, the understanding of biotic and abiotic factors that drive the composition and distribution patterns of the microbial communities is still scarce. Strong relationships between the variability of prokaryotic community composition and population shifts in microzooplankton and among viruses have been demonstrated in previous studies (Winter et al. 2004, Jing et al. 2009), while associations between microbial community structure and environmental factors have been explored under various oceanic conditions (Herfort et al. 2007, Ghiglione et al. 2008. Little horizontal variation in bacterioplankton community was found among stations just a few kilometers apart (near the Anvers Island in the Antarctic; Murray et al. 1998) and 1500 km apart (in the Arabian Sea; Riemann et al. 1999), whereas significant variation was observed along the coast of the NW Mediterranean Sea (Schauer et al. 2000).The Sea of Okhotsk is one of the marginal seas of the North Pacific Ocean. Although the Sea is geographically located at a temperate latitude, it has many characteristics of a polar ocean, namely, large seasonal variation in water temperatures (~14°C) and large amounts of sea ice along the Siberian coast over the northwestern continental shelf of the east coast of Sakhalin Island ever...