title: Diversity and structure of soil bacterial communities in the Fildes Region (maritime Antarctica) as revealed by 454 pyrosequencing.
abstract: This study assessed the diversity and composition of bacterial communities in four different soils (human-, penguin-, seal-colony impacted soils and pristine soil) in the Fildes Region (King George Island, Antarctica) using 454 pyrosequencing with bacterial-specific primers targeting the 16S rRNA gene. Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria, Acidobacteria, and Verrucomicrobia were abundant phyla in almost all the soil samples. The four types of soils were significantly different in geochemical properties and bacterial community structure. Thermotogae, Cyanobacteria, Fibrobacteres, Deinococcus-Thermus, and Chlorobi obviously varied in their abundance among the 4 soil types. Considering all the samples together, members of the genera Gaiella, Chloracidobacterium, Nitrospira, Polaromonas, Gemmatimonas, Sphingomonas, and Chthoniobacter were found to predominate, whereas members of the genera Chamaesiphon, Herbaspirillum, Hirschia, Nevskia, Nitrosococcus, Rhodococcus, Rhodomicrobium, and Xanthomonas varied obviously in their abundance among the four soil types. Distance-based redundancy analysis revealed that pH (p < 0.01), phosphate phosphorus (p < 0.01), organic carbon (p < 0.05), and organic nitrogen (p < 0.05) were the most significant factors that correlated with the community distribution of soil bacteria. To our knowledge, this is the first study to explore the soil bacterial communities in human-, penguin-, and seal- colony impacted soils from ice-free areas in maritime Antarctica using high-throughput pyrosequencing.
authors.affiliation: Key Lab of Marine Bioactive Substances, The First Institute of Oceanography, State Oceanic Administration Qingdao, China.
authors.forename: Neng Fei
authors.initials: NF
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: Institute of Medicinal Biotechnology, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Tao
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Polar Research Institute of China Shanghai, China.
authors.forename: Fang
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Microbiología, Escuela Nacional de Ciencias Biológicas, Instituto Politécnico Nacional Mexico, Mexico.
authors.forename: En Tao
authors.initials: ET
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: Polar Research Institute of China Shanghai, China.
authors.forename: Jian Feng
authors.initials: JF
authors.lastname: He
authors.affiliation: Chemical Engineering Institute, Qingdao University Qingdao, China.
authors.forename: Hui
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Ding
authors.affiliation: Chemical Engineering Institute, Qingdao University Qingdao, China.
authors.forename: Bo Tao
authors.initials: BT
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Department of Bioengineering and Biotechnology, Qingdao University of Science and Technology Qingdao, China.
authors.forename: Jie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Key Lab of Marine Bioactive Substances, The First Institute of Oceanography, State Oceanic Administration Qingdao, China.
authors.forename: Xiang Bin
authors.initials: XB
authors.lastname: Ran
authors.affiliation: Key Lab of Marine Bioactive Substances, The First Institute of Oceanography, State Oceanic Administration Qingdao, China.
authors.forename: Jia Ye
authors.initials: JY
authors.lastname: Zang
keywords: 16S rRNA gene; antarctica; bacterial communities; molecular ecology; soil geochemical property