The effects of coastal developments on microbial communities in the southern Korean offshore ocean: lessons from metagenomics analysis |
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학술지명 한국해양학회
저자 강지현,김영성,김재환,김기환,장지은,원남일,이혁제,박상률
발표일 2016-05-20
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The global ocean has been under various environmental or anthropogenic stressors and thus ecosystem resilience became one of the key issues for our better understanding the sustainability of marine ecosystem. Coastal ecosystems including offshore oceans have been remarked as the most dynamic and often vulnerable environment under coastal developments, e.g., sand-mining human activities and climate forcing. Shifts or decreases in biodiversity of marine microbial communities would be a significant indicator to determine whether the marine ecosystems are affected by these complex forcing stressors. DNA sequence based metagenomics using Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technique has recently become a promising tool to capture the community structure and biodiversity of microorganisms from environmental DNA (eDNA). A handful of studies have so far been performed using this approach to investigate natural microbial communities in marine environments. In this study, using metagenomic DNA sequencing (V3-V4 region of 16S rRNA amplicon) we here analyze and compare the seawater and sediment samples collected from southern offshore coastal regions in Korea including “sand mining” areas vs. presumably “undisturbed” (control) areas to determine whether human-driven coastal developments have significantly affected the marine natural microbial community. We find that the sand mining areas harbor significantly lower levels of microbial diversities both in seawater and in sediment communities, compared to the undisturbed areas. Also, the sand mining areas have distinct microbial community structure/composition, particularly the sediment ecosystem. It appears that dominant species did not occur there, by comparison to more natural sites, perhaps due to continuous physical stresses imposed on these disturbed ecosystems. The present study highlights that metagenomics can be a useful tool for monitoring and diagnosing the human impacts on the marine microbial communities from eDNA. |