Abstract
Uncovering the role of environmental factors and finding critical factors which harbor significant fractions in governing microbial communities remain key questions in coastal marine systems. To detect the interactions between environmental factors and distributions of virio- and bacterioplankton in trophic coastal areas, we used flow cytometry to investigate the abundance of virio- and bacterioplankton covering 31 stations in the Bohai Sea of China. Our results suggested that the average abundance of total virus (TV) in winter (∼2.29×108 particles/mL) was slightly lower than in summer (∼3.83×108 particles/mL). The mean total bacterial abundance (TB) was much lower in winter (∼2.54×107 particles/mL) than in summer (∼5.43×107 particles/mL). Correlation analysis via redundancy analysis (RDA) and network analysis among virioplankton, bacterioplankton and environmental factors revealed that the abundances of viral and bacterial subpopulations depend on environmental factors. In winter, only temperature significantly influenced the abundances of virio- and bacterioplankton. In summer, in addition to temperature, both salinity and nutrient (SiO2) had a remarkable impact on the distribution of virio- and bacterioplankton. Our results showed a clear seasonal and trophic pattern throughout the whole water system, which revealed that temperature and eutrophication may play crucial roles in microbial distribution pattern.
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Acknowledgements
We are thankful to the crew and scientists involved with this research. We thank the School of Biological Sciences and Flinders University for providing funding for James G. Mitchell and James S. Paterson to work on the project.
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Foundation item: The National Basic Research Program (973 Program) of China under contract No. 2015CB453300; the Strategic Priority Research Programme of Chinese Academic of Sciences under contract No. XDA11020403; the Key Research Project of Frontier Science of Chinese Academy of Sciences under contract No. QYZDB-SSW-DQC041; the Technology Service Network Plan of Chinese Academy of Sciences under contract No. STS, ZSYS-006; the External Cooperation Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (supported by the Bureau of International Cooperation, the Chinese Academy of Sciences) under contract No. 133337KYSB20180015.
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Wang, C., Wu, L., Wang, Y. et al. Coupling virio- and bacterioplankton populations with environmental variable changes in the Bohai Sea. Acta Oceanol. Sin. 39, 72–83 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13131-020-1591-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13131-020-1591-3