Picoplankton and virioplankton abundance and community structure in Pearl River Estuary and Daya Bay, South China

By using flow cytometry techniques, we investigated the abundance and composition of the heterotrophic prokaryotes, virioplankton and picophytoplankton community in the Pearl River Estuary and Daya Bay in the summer of 2012. We identified two subgroups of prokaryotes, high nucleic acid(HNA) and low nucleic acid(LNA), characterized by different nucleic acid contents. HNA abundance was significantly correlated with larger phytoplankton and Synechococcus(Syn) abundance, which suggested the important role of organic substrates released from primary producers on bacterial growth. Although LNA did not show any association with environmental variables, it was a vital component of the microbial community. In contrast to previous studies, the total virioplankton concentration had a poor relationship with nutrient availability. The positive relationship between large-sized phytoplankton abundance and the V–I population confirmed that V–I was a phytoplankton-infecting viral subgroup. Although the V–II group(bacteriophages)was dominant in the virioplankton community, it was not related with prokaryotic abundance, which indicated factors other than hosts controlling V–II abundance or the uncertainty of virus-host coupling. With respect to the picophytoplankton community,our results implied that river input exerted a strong limitation to Syn distribution in the estuary, while picoeukaryotes(Euk) were numerically less abundant and showed a quite different distribution pattern from that of Syn, and hence presented ecological properties distinct from Syn in our two studied areas.     

淮河流域淮安段着生藻类群落结构特征分析

于2021年5月对淮安境内淮河主要干支流8个点位的水质状况和着生藻类群落结构采样调查,应用3种多样性指数模型评价区域水生态健康状况,并探究影响着生藻类多样性的因素。结果表明：采样期间淮河流域淮安市域共检出着生藻类3门23科32属（种）,由硅藻门、蓝藻门和绿藻门组成,硅藻门占绝对优势;多样性指数计算结果显示,流域水生态状况良好,整体表现为清洁-轻污型水体,淮河上游水质稍差于其他水域;结合水质监测数据与卫星遥感影像分析,认为生境状况是影响着生藻类群落分布的主要因素。     

Meter-scale variation within a single transect demands attention to taxon accumulation curves in riverine microbiome studies

● Riverine microbiomes exhibited hyperlocal variation within a single transect. ● Certain family-level taxa directionally associated with river center and bank. ● Taxon accumulation curves within a transect urges more nuanced sampling design. Microbial communities inhabiting river ecosystems play crucial roles in global biogeochemical cycling and pollution attenuation. Spatial variations in local microbial assemblages are important for detailed understanding of community assembly and developing robust biodiversity sampling strategies. Here, we intensely analyzed twenty water samples collected from a one-meter spaced transect from the near-shore to the near-center in the Meramec River in eastern Missouri, USA and examined the microbial community composition with 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing. Riverine microbiomes across the transect exhibited extremely high similarity, with Pearson’s correlation coefficients above 0.9 for all pairwise community composition comparisons. However, despite the high similarity, PERMANOVA revealed significant spatial differences between near-shore and near-center communities (p = 0.001). Sloan’s neutral model simulations revealed that within-transect community composition variation was largely explained by demographic stochasticity (R² = 0.89). Despite being primarily explained by neutral processes, LefSe analyses also revealed taxa from ten families of which relative abundances differed directionally from the bank to the river center, indicating an additional role of environmental filtering. Notably, the local variations within a river transect can have profound impacts on the documentation of alpha diversity. Taxon-accumulation curves indicated that even twenty samples did not fully saturate the sampling effort at the genus level, yet four, six and seven samples were able to capture 80% of the phylum-level, family-level, and genus-level diversity, respectively. This study for the first time reveals hyperlocal variations in riverine microbiomes and their assembly mechanisms, demanding attention to more robust sampling strategies for documenting microbial diversity in riverine systems.