Sediment Bacterial Community Structure under the Influence of Different Domestic Sewage Types

Sediment bacterial communities are critical to the biogeochemical cycle in river ecosystems, but our understanding of the relationship between sediment bacterial communities and their specific input streams in rivers remains insufficient. In this study, we analyzed the sediment bacterial community structure in a local river receiving discharge of urban domestic sewage by applying Illumina MiSeq high-throughput sequencing. The results showed that the bacterial communities of sediments samples of different pollution types had similar dominant phyla, mainly Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria, Chloroflexi and Firmicutes, but their relative abundances were different. Moreover, there were great differences at the genus level. For example, the genus Bacillus showed statistically significant differences in the hotel site. The clustering of bacterial communities at various sites and the dominant families (i.e., Nocardioidaceae, and Sphingomonadaceae) observed in the residential quarter differed from other sites. This result suggested that environmentally induced species sorting greatly influenced the sediment bacterial community composition. The bacterial co-occurrence patterns showed that the river bacteria had a nonrandom modular structure. Microbial taxonomy from the same module had strong ecological links (such as the nitrogenium cycle and degradation of organic pollutants). Additionally, PICRUSt metabolic inference analysis showed the most important function of river bacterial communities under the influence of different types of domestic sewage was metabolism (e.g., genes related to xenobiotic degradation predominated in residential quarter samples). In general, our results emphasize that the adaptive changes and interactions in the bacterial community structure of river sediment represent responses to different exogenous pollution sources.