title: Identifying the key taxonomic categories that characterize microbial community diversity using full-scale classification: a case study of microbial communities in the sediments of Hangzhou Bay.
abstract: Coastal areas are land-sea transitional zones with complex natural and anthropogenic disturbances. Microorganisms in coastal sediments adapt to such disturbances both individually and as a community. The microbial community structure changes spatially and temporally under environmental stress. In this study, we investigated the microbial community structure in the sediments of Hangzhou Bay, a seriously polluted bay in China. In order to identify the roles and contribution of all microbial taxa, we set thresholds as 0.1% for rare taxa and 1% for abundant taxa, and classified all operational taxonomic units into six exclusive categories based on their abundance. The results showed that the key taxa in differentiating the communities are abundant taxa (AT), conditionally abundant taxa (CAT), and conditionally rare or abundant taxa (CRAT). A large population in conditionally rare taxa (CRT) made this category collectively significant in differentiating the communities. Both bacteria and archaea demonstrated a distance decay pattern of community similarity in the bay, and this pattern was strengthened by rare taxa, CRT and CRAT, but weakened by AT and CAT. This implied that the low abundance taxa were more deterministically distributed, while the high abundance taxa were more ubiquitously distributed.
authors.affiliation: College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
authors.forename: Tianjiao
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Dai
authors.affiliation: School of Environment, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
authors.forename: Yan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
authors.forename: Yushi
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Tang
authors.affiliation: Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100085, China.
authors.forename: Yaohui
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Bai
authors.affiliation: College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
authors.forename: Yile
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Tao
authors.affiliation: Zhejiang Provincial Zhoushan Marine Ecological Environmental Monitoring Station, Zhoushan 316021, China.
authors.forename: Bei
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.affiliation: College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China dhwen@pku.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Donghui
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Wen
mesh_terms: D001105:Archaea / Q000145:classification; D001419:Bacteria / Q000145:classification; D061006:Bays / Q000382:microbiology; D002681:China; D002965:Classification; D019015:Geologic Sediments / Q000382:microbiology*; D059013:Microbial Consortia; D010802:Phylogeny
keywords: Hangzhou Bay; abundance range; dissimilarity contribution; distance decay of similarity; microbial community structure; taxa classification