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Seasonal and inter-annual variability of bacterioplankton communities in the subtropical Pearl River Estuary, China

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Abstract

It is widely recognized that environmental factors substantially influence on the seasonal and inter-annual variability of bacterioplankton communities, yet little is known about the seasonality of bacterioplankton communities in subtropical estuaries at longer-term time scales. Here, the bacterioplankton communities from the eight major outlets of the subtropical Pearl River Estuary were investigated across 3 years (2017–2019) using full-length 16S rRNA gene sequencing. Significant seasonal and inter-annual variation was observed in bacterioplankton community compositions across the 3 years (p < 0.05). In addition, the inferred functional composition of the communities varied with seasons, although not significantly, suggesting that functional redundancy existed among communities and across seasons that could help to cope with environmental changes. Five evaluated environmental parameters (temperature, salinity, pH, total dissolved solids (TDS), total phosphorus (TP)) were significantly correlated with community composition variation, while only three environmental parameters (temperature, pH, and TDS) were correlated with variation in inferred functional composition. Moreover, community composition tracked the seasonal temperature gradients, indicating that temperature was a key environmental factor that affected bacterioplankton community’s variation along with seasonal succession patterns. Gammaproteobacteria and Alphaproteobacteria were the most dominant classes in the surface waters of Pearl River Estuary, and their members exhibited divergent responses to temperature changes, while several taxa within these group could be indicators of low and high temperatures that are associated with seasonal changes. These results strengthen our understanding of bacterioplankton community variation in association with temperature-dependent seasonal changes in subtropical estuarine ecosystems.

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The datasets used or analyzed in this study are available from the corresponding author upon request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank LetPub (www.letpub.com) for its linguistic assistance during the preparation of this manuscript.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2018YFD0900802 and 2018YFD0900904) and the Central Public-interest Scientific Institution Basal Research Fund, CAFS (2017HY-ZD0207).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Pearl River Fisheries Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences, Guangzhou, 510380, China

    Yongzhan Mai, Songyao Peng & Zini Lai

  2. Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Aquatic Animal Immune Technology, Guangzhou, 510070, China

    Zini Lai

  3. Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Emergency Test for Dangerous Chemicals, Institute of Analysis, Guangdong Academy of Sciences (China National Analytical Center, Guangzhou), Guangzhou, 100 Xianlie Middle Road, 510070, China

    Xuesong Wang

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  1. Yongzhan Mai
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  2. Songyao Peng
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YM: conceptualization, methodology, investigation, data curation, writing—original draft; SP: methodology, formal analysis, visualization; ZL: supervision, funding acquisition; XW: conceptualization, supervision, writing—review and editing.

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Correspondence to Zini Lai or Xuesong Wang.

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Mai, Y., Peng, S., Lai, Z. et al. Seasonal and inter-annual variability of bacterioplankton communities in the subtropical Pearl River Estuary, China. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 21981–21997 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-17449-8

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