Microbial community structure of Arctic seawater as revealed by pyrosequencing

This study aimed to determine the microbial community structure of seawater in (ICE-1) and out (FUBIAO) of the pack ice zone in the Arctic region. Approximate 10 L seawater was filtrated by 0.2 μm Whatman nuclepore filters and the environmental genomic DNA was extracted. We conducted a detailed census of microbial communities by pyrosequencing. Analysis of the microbial community structures indicated that these two samples had high bacterial, archaeal and eukaryotic diversity. Proteobacteria and Bacteroidetes were the two dominant members of the bacterioplankton community in both samples, and their relative abundance were 51.29% and 35.39%, 72.95% and 23.21%, respectively. Euryarchaeota was the most abundant archaeal phylum, and the relative abundance was nearly up to 100% in FUBIAO and 60% in ICE-1. As for the eukaryotes, no_rank_Eukaryota, Arthropoda and no_rank_Metazoa were the most abundant groups in Sample FUBIAO, accounting for 85.29% of the total reads. The relative abundance of the most abundant phylum in Sample ICE-1, no_rank_Eukaryota and no_rank_Metazoa, was up to 90.69% of the total reads. Alphaproteobacteria, Flavobacteria and Gammaproteobacteria were the top three abundant classes in the two samples at the bacterial class level. There were also differences in the top ten abundant bacterial, archaeal and eukaryotic OTUs at the level of 97% similarity between the two samples.