Use of Pyrosequencing for Characterizing Microbial Community at Phylum Level in Yeongsan River Watershed during Early Summer

Abstract

We have conducted pyrosequencing for freshwater microbial community analyses. Fourteen sites along the Yeongsan river were selected for this study, and samples were collected monthly from May to July, 2012. Total 987,380 reads were obtained from 42 samples and used for taxonomic classification and OTU distribution analysis. Our results showed that high geographical and temporal variation in the phylum level bacterial composition, suggesting that microbial community is a very sensitive parameter affected by the surrounding environments including tributaries and land use nearby. In addition, we conducted an OTU-based Microbial Source Tracking to identify sources of fecal pollution in the same region. From this study Firmicutes was found to be the most influential taxa in this region. Here, we report that the use of pyrosequencing based microbial community analysis may give an additional information on freshwater quality monitoring, in addition to the currently used water quality parameters, such as BOD and pH.