Microbial Community Structure in the Sediments and Its Relation to Environmental Factors in Eutrophicated Sancha Lake

Abstract

To study the microbial community structure in sediments and its relation to eutrophication environment factors, the sediments and the overlying water of Sancha Lake were collected in the four seasons. MiSeq high-throughput sequencing was conducted for the V3–V4 hypervariable regions of the 16S rRNA gene and was used to analyze the microbial community structure in sediments. Pearson correlation and redundancy analysis (RDA) were conducted to determine the relation between microbial populations and eutrophic factors. The results demonstrated four main patterns: (1) in the 36 samples that were collected, the classification annotation suggested 64 phyla, 259 classes, 476 orders, 759 families, and 9325 OTUs; (2) The diversity indices were ordered according to their values as with summer > winter > autumn > spring; (3) The microbial populations in the four seasons belonged to two distinct characteristic groups; (4) pH, dissolved oxygen (DO), total phosphorus (TP), and total nitrogen (TN) had significant effects on the community composition and structure, which further affected the dissolved total phosphorus (DTP) significantly. The present study demonstrates that the microbial communities in Sancha Lake sediments are highly diverse, their compositions and distributions are significantly different between spring and non-spring, and Actinobacteria and Cyanobacteria may be the key populations or indicator organisms for eutrophication.