Bacterial and archaeal community structure of pan-Arctic Ocean sediments revealed by pyrosequencing

This study was to investigate bacterial and archaeal community structure of pan-Arctic Ocean sediments by pyrosequencing. In total, investigation of three marine sediments revealed 15 002 bacterial and 4 362 archaeal operational taxonomic units (OTUs) at the 97% similarity level. Analysis of community structure indicated that these three samples had high bacterial and archaeal diversity. The most relatively abundant bacterial group in Samples CC1 and R05 was Proteobacteria, while Firmicutes was dominant in Sample BL03. Thaumarchaeota was the most relatively abundant archaeal phylum in Samples CC1 and R05, and the relative abundance of Thaumarchaeota was almost as high as that of Euryarchaeota in Sample BL03. These two phyla accounted for nearly 100% of the archaeal OTUs. δ-Proteobacteria and γ-Proteobacteria were the two most relatively abundant classes at Proteobacterial class level, and their relative abundance was more than 60% in Samples CC1 and R05. There were also differences in the top 10 relatively abundant bacterial and archaeal OTUs among the three samples at the 97% similarity, and only 12 core bacterial OTUs were detected. Overall, this study indicated that there were distinct microbial communities and many unique OTUs in these three samples.