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Diversity analysis of bacterial community compositions in sediments of urban lakes by terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP)

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Abstract

Bacteria are crucial components in lake sediments and play important role in various environmental processes. Urban lakes in the densely populated cities are often small, shallow, highly artificial and hypereutrophic compared to rural and natural lakes and have been overlooked for a long time. In the present study, bacterial community compositions in surface sediments of three urban lakes (Lake Mochou, Lake Qianhu and Lake Zixia) in Nanjing City, China, were investigated using the terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) of PCR-amplified 16S rRNA gene and clone libraries. Remarkable differences in the T-RFLP patterns were observed in different lakes or different sampling stations of the same lake. Canonical correspondence analysis indicated that total nitrogen (TN) had significant effects on bacterial community structure in the lake sediments. Chloroflexi were the most dominant bacterial group in the clone library from Lake Mochou (21.7 % of the total clones) which was partly associated with its higher TN and organic matters concentrations. However, Bacteroidetes appeared to be dominated colonizers in the sediments of Lake Zixia (20.4 % of the total clones). Our study gives a comprehensive insight into the structure of bacterial community of urban lake sediments, indicating that the environmental factors played a key role in influencing the bacterial community composition in the freshwater ecosystems.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Cuiling Jiang for her kind help during field sampling. This work was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (2008CB418104), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41001044, 41101052), Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province, China (BK2010522, BK2011876), the Open Foundation from the State Key Laboratory of Pollution Control and Resources Reuse at Nanjing University (No. PCRRF11022), the Project of Nanjing Institute of Geography & Limnology (NIGLAS2010QD10), the Ministry of Water Resources’ Special Funds for Scientific Research on Public Causes (201201026) and a Project Funded by the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Hydrology and Water Resources, Hohai University, Nanjing, 210098, China

    Dayong Zhao, Rui Huang, Jianqun Wang, Ting Ma & Meng Wang

  2. State Key Laboratory of Lake Science and Environment, Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, 210008, China

    Jin Zeng & Qinglong L. Wu

  3. State Key Laboratory of Hydrology-Water Resources and Hydraulic Engineering, Hohai University, Nanjing, 210098, China

    Dayong Zhao, Jin Zeng & Wenming Yan

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  1. Dayong Zhao
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Correspondence to Dayong Zhao.

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Zhao, D., Huang, R., Zeng, J. et al. Diversity analysis of bacterial community compositions in sediments of urban lakes by terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP). World J Microbiol Biotechnol 28, 3159–3170 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11274-012-1126-y

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