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Bacterial Communities Associated with the Biofilms Formed in High-Altitude Brackish Water Pangong Tso Located in the Himalayan Plateau

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Abstract

Pangong Tso is a long and narrow lake situated at an altitude of ~ 4266 m amsl in the Himalayan Plateau on the side of the India/China border. Biofilm has been observed in a small area near the shore of Pangong Tso. Bacterial communities of the lake sediment, water and biofilms were studied using amplicon sequencing of V3-V4 region of the 16S rRNA gene. The standard QIIME pipeline was used for analysis. The metabolic potential of the community was predicted using functional prediction tool Tax4Fun. Bacterial phyla Proteobacteria, followed by Bacteroidetes, Acidobacteria, Planctomycetes, Actinobacteria, and Firmicutes, were found to be dominant across these samples. Shannon’s and Simpson’s alpha diversity analysis revealed that sediment communities are the most diverse, and water communities are the least diverse. Principal Coordinates based beta diversity analysis showed significant variation in the bacterial communities of the water, sediment and biofilm samples. Bacterial phyla Verrucomicrobia, Deinococcus-Thermus and Cyanobacteria were explicitly enriched in the biofilm samples. Predictive functional profiling of these bacterial communities showed a higher abundance of genes involved in photosynthesis, biosynthesis of secondary metabolites, carbon fixation in photosynthetic organisms and glyoxylate and dicarboxylate metabolism in the biofilm sample. In conclusion, the Pangong Tso bacterial communities are quite similar to other saline and low-temperature lakes in the Tibetan Plateau. Bacterial community structure of the biofilm samples was significantly different from that of the water and sediment samples and enrichment of saprophytic communities was observed in the biofilm samples, indicating an important succession event in this high-altitude lake.

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Data Availability

The sequence data is made available at NCBI SRA submission with Bioproject ID PRJNA496310 for the microbial mat, sediment and the water bacterial community.

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Acknowledgements

Authors acknowledge the Director, NCCS, Pune for extending necessary facilities for this study. The authors also acknowledge the financial support of the SERB-DST (YSS/2015/000149) and DBT (BT/Coor. II/01/03/2016).

Funding

The SERB-DST (YSS/2015/000149) and DBT (BT/Coord. II/01/03/2016) provided funds this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Center for Microbial Resource-National Center for Cell Science, Pune, 411021, India

    Diptaraj S. Chaudhari, Dhiraj P. Dhotre, Kunal Jani, Avinash Sharma, Yogesh S. Shouche & Praveen Rahi

  2. Department of Botany and Environmental Science, Sri Guru Granth Sahib World University, Fatehgarh Sahib, 140406, India

    Yadvinder Singh

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  1. Diptaraj S. Chaudhari
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Contributions

PR designed the study and collected the samples. KJ and AS helped in the molecular work. DC performed the bioinformatics and statistical analyses. DD guided in the analysis. PR and DC drafted the manuscript. PR supervised the data analysis and revised the manuscript. YS analyzed physicochemical properties of the Pangong Lake water. All authors have read and approved the final version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Praveen Rahi.

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Supplementary file1 (TIF 804 kb)

Fig. S1 UPGMA cluster tree using the neighbor-joining method based on the relative abundance of bacterial families

Supplementary file2 (PNG 115 kb)

Fig. S2 Venn diagram representing numbers of shared and unique bacterial OTUs across the samples.

Supplementary file3 (XLSX 51 kb)

File S1 List of shared and core bacterial OTUs detected in the biofilm, water and sediment samples of the Pangong Tso.

Supplementary file4 (XLSX 281 kb)

File S2 OTUs and their currosponding abundance significantly enriched in the three different sample categories.

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Chaudhari, D.S., Dhotre, D.P., Jani, K. et al. Bacterial Communities Associated with the Biofilms Formed in High-Altitude Brackish Water Pangong Tso Located in the Himalayan Plateau. Curr Microbiol 77, 4072–4084 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00284-020-02244-4

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