Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology

, Volume 100, Issue 13, pp 6069–6079 | Cite as

Microbial profiling of South African acid mine water samples using next generation sequencing platform

Environmental biotechnology
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Abstract

This study monitored changes in bacterial and fungal structure in a mine water in a monthly basis over 4 months. Over the 4-month study period, mine water samples contained more bacteria (91.06 %) compared to fungi (8.94 %). For bacteria, mine water samples were dominated by Proteobacteria (39.14 to 65.06 %) followed by Firmicutes (26.34 to 28.9 %) in summer, and Cyanobacteria (27.05 %) in winter. In the collected samples, 18 % of bacteria could not be assigned to a phylum and remained unclassified suggesting hitherto vast untapped microbial diversity especially during winter. The fungal domain was the sole eukaryotic microorganism found in the mine water samples with unclassified fungi (68.2 to 91 %) as the predominant group, followed by Basidiomycota (6.9 to 27.8 %). The time of collection, which was linked to the weather, had higher impact on bacterial community than fungal community. The bacterial operational taxonomic units (OTUs) ranged from 865 to 4052 over the 4-month sampling period, while fungal OTUs varied from 73 to 249. The diversity indices suggested that the bacterial community inhabiting the mine water samples were more diverse than the fungal community. The canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) results highlighted that the bacterial community variance had the strongest relationship with water temperature, conductivity, pH, and dissolved oxygen (DO) content, as compared to fungi and water characteristics, had the greatest contribution to both bacterial and fungal community variance. The results provided the relationships between microbial community and environmental variables in the studied mining sites.

Keywords

Bacteria Fungi Acid mine water Microbial diversity Pyrosequencing 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

The authors are thankful for the University of South Africa (UNISA) research fund.

Compliance with ethical standards

Ethical approval

This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from the National Research Fundation (NRF) (Grant number: M590).

Conflicts of interest

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Supplementary material

253_2016_7428_MOESM1_ESM.pdf (371 kb)
ESM 1 (PDF 371 kb)

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Environmental SciencesUniversity of South Africa, Science CampusJohannesburgSouth Africa

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