Abstract
Hypersaline meromictic lakes are extreme environments in which water stratification is associated with powerful physicochemical gradients and high salt concentrations. Furthermore, their physical stability coupled with vertical water column partitioning makes them important research model systems in microbial niche differentiation and biogeochemical cycling. Here, we compare the prokaryotic assemblages from Ursu and Fara Fund hypersaline meromictic lakes (Transylvanian Basin, Romania) in relation to their limnological factors and infer their role in elemental cycling by matching taxa to known taxon-specific biogeochemical functions. To assess the composition and structure of prokaryotic communities and the environmental factors that structure them, deep-coverage small subunit (SSU) ribosomal RNA (rDNA) amplicon sequencing, community domain-specific quantitative PCR and physicochemical analyses were performed on samples collected along depth profiles. The analyses showed that the lakes harbored multiple and diverse prokaryotic communities whose distribution mirrored the water stratification patterns. Ursu Lake was found to be dominated by Bacteria and to have a greater prokaryotic diversity than Fara Fund Lake that harbored an increased cell density and was populated mostly by Archaea within oxic strata. In spite of their contrasting diversity, the microbial populations indigenous to each lake pointed to similar physiological functions within carbon degradation and sulfate reduction. Furthermore, the taxonomy results coupled with methane detection and its stable C isotope composition indicated the presence of a yet-undescribed methanogenic group in the lakes’ hypersaline monimolimnion. In addition, ultrasmall uncultivated archaeal lineages were detected in the chemocline of Fara Fund Lake, where the recently proposed Nanohaloarchaeota phylum was found to thrive.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by grants of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, CNCS–UEFIS-CDI, project numbers PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0546 and PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0765. A-ŞA was supported by a POSDRU/159/1.5/S/132400 research scholarship; CC was supported by Grants PN 09-360201 and POSDRU/159/1.5/S/133391; AI was supported by a POSDRU/159/1.5/S/133391 doctoral scholarship; MSR and MP were supported by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). ORNL is managed by UT-Battelle, LLC, for the US Department of Energy. We thank Zamin Yang and Dawn Klingeman for the help provided with Illumina amplicon preparation and sequencing. We are grateful to Tudor Tămaş for the mineralogical analysis, Zsolt G Keresztes for supporting unpublished data and to Dimitry Y Sorokin for his critical review of the manuscript. We are grateful to Daniela Buta (Ocna Sibiului) and Nagy Fülop János (Sovata) for the permission to enter the study areas.
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Andrei, AŞ., Robeson, M., Baricz, A. et al. Contrasting taxonomic stratification of microbial communities in two hypersaline meromictic lakes. ISME J 9, 2642–2656 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2015.60
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2015.60
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