Bacterial communities of saline lakes in western Mongolia

Background/Question/Methods

Mongolian saline lakes were rarely studied, specifically the bacterial community structures of saline lakes in western Mongolia are totally unknown. The objectives of this study were to characterize the bacterial diversity and community composition and to describe the biogeochemical characteristics in the Gobi desert regions and Forest Mountain saline lakes; particularly those related to environmental parameters associated the bacterial assemblages. All the samples were performed with 454 sequencing platform formatted the datasets of bacterial community structure and analyzed by Silva-NGS, bacterial diversity (Shannon’s and Simpson’s indices) and richness (Chao1 and ACE estimators).

Results/Conclusions

In this study, we examined bacterial diversity and community structure in 18 lakes located in the western Mongolia that were affected to various degrees by salinity deposition and assessed correlations with 43 physical and chemical parameters. Totally 51,151 OTUs were retrieved from 275,109 qualified bacterial sequences from 72 samples with different directions representing distinct geographic features, including Gobi desert, steppe, mountain range and forest mountain area. In a brief, 45 bacterial phyla were observed, the phylum Proteobacteria was the most dominant group followed by Cyanobacteria, Actinobacteria and Bacteroidetes in the bacterial communities. Shifts in the bacterial communities were correlated to selected physico-chemical variables along the lake salinity and geographic specificity. These results suggest that different environmental selections may act on bacterial populations in Gobi desert and Forest Mountain lakes on the western Mongolia, potentially resulting in different community structures and diversity patterns.