Saxena, G, Mitra, S, Marzinelli, EM et al. (7 more authors) (2018) Metagenomics Reveals the Influence of Land Use and Rain on the Benthic Microbial Communities in a Tropical Urban Waterway. mSystems, 3 (3). e00136-17. ISSN 2379-5077
Abstract
Growing demands for potable water have led to extensive reliance on waterways in tropical megacities. Attempts to manage these waterways in an environmentally sustainable way generally lack an understanding of microbial processes and how they are influenced by urban factors, such as land use and rain. Here, we describe the composition and functional potential of benthic microbial communities from an urban waterway network and analyze the effects of land use and rain perturbations on these communities. With a sequence depth of 3 billion reads from 48 samples, these metagenomes represent nearly full coverage of microbial communities. The predominant taxa in these waterways were Nitrospira and Coleofasciculus, indicating the presence of nitrogen and carbon fixation in this system. Gene functions from carbohydrate, protein, and nucleic acid metabolism suggest the presence of primary and secondary productivity in such nutrient-deficient systems. Comparison of microbial communities by land use type and rain showed that while there are significant differences in microbial communities in land use, differences due to rain perturbations were rain event specific. The more diverse microbial communities in the residential areas featured a higher abundance of reads assigned to genes related to community competition. However, the less diverse communities from industrial areas showed a higher abundance of reads assigned to specialized functions such as organic remediation. Finally, our study demonstrates that microbially diverse populations in well-managed waterways, where contaminant levels are within defined limits, are comparable to those in other relatively undisturbed freshwater systems.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Editors: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | Copyright © 2018 Saxena et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) |
Keywords: | benthic microbial communities; community composition and functions; land use; rain perturbations; urban environment |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Medicine and Health (Leeds) > Institute of Molecular Medicine (LIMM) (Leeds) > Section of Molecular Gastroenterology (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 18 Jan 2019 14:19 |
Last Modified: | 18 Jan 2019 14:19 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | American Society for Microbiology |
Identification Number: | 10.1128/mSystems.00136-17 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:141234 |