Abstract
Coral reef ecosystems usually distribute in oligotrophic tropical and subtropical marine environments, but they possess great biodiversity and high productivity. It may attribute to its efficient internal nutrient cycle system. However, the knowledge of functional microbial community structure is still limited. In this study, both functional gene array (Geochip 5.0) and nifH Illumina sequencing were used to profile the overall functional genes and diazotrophic communities associated with coral Porites pukoensis. More than 7500 microbial functional genes were detected from archaea, bacteria, and fungi. Most of these genes are related to the transformation of carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus, providing evidence that microbes in the coral holobiont play important roles in the biogeochemical cycle of coral reef ecosystems. Our results indicated a high diversity of diazotrophs associated with corals. The dominant diazotrophic groups were related to phyla Alphaproteobacteria, Deltaproteobacteria, Cyanobacteria, and Gammaproteobacteria. And the dominant diazotrophic communities were divided into four clusters. They were affiliated with nifH sequences from genera Zymomonas, Halorhodospira, Leptolyngbya, Trichormus, and Desulfovibrio, indicating these groups may play a more important role in the nitrogen-fixing process in the coral holobiont. This study revealed functional gene diversity and suggested the roles they played in the biogeochemical cycling of the coral holobiont.
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Data availability
The nifH gene sequencing data has been deposited into NCBI Sequence Read Archive database, with accession number PRJNA715364.
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Acknowledgements
The research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41676107, 41976147), the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDA13020300), and the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2017YFC0506301, 2018FY100105).
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Zhang, Y., Yang, Q., Zhang, Y. et al. The diversity and metabolic potential of the microbial functional gene associated with Porites pukoensis. Ecotoxicology 30, 986–995 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10646-021-02419-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10646-021-02419-0