Bacterial community shifts in different functional zones of a reservoir with ecological purification facilities

Ecological purification in a reservoir is an important strategy to control the level of nutrients in water. The bacterial community of such a reservoir is the main agent for pollutant degradation, which has not been fully documented. Taking the Jinze Reservoir, a freshwater source for Shanghai, China as the case, its spatial distributions of water and sediment bacteria were determined using 16S rRNA gene-based Illumina MiSeq sequencing, and the environmental parameters were analyzed. The reservoir takes natural river water and functions as an ecological purification system, consisting of three functional zones, i.e., pretreatment zone, ecological purification zone, and ecological sustaining zone. Results show that the concentrations of both total nitrogen (TN) and total phosphorus (TP) decreased considerably after the ecological treatment, and the concentration of dissolved oxygen (DO) in the ecological purification zone was boosted from that before pretreatment. In addition, patterns of bacterial communities in both water and sediment were similar and consisted of mainly Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria, and Bacteroidetes. However, difference in water bacterial composition was distinct in each functional zone, whereas the bacterial communities in sediment changed only slightly among sediment samples. Network analysis revealed nonrandom co-occurrence patterns of bacterial community composition in water and sediment, and Pseudomonas, unclassified Comamonadaceae, Variovorax, and Dechloromonas were the key taxa in the co-occurrence network. The bacterial taxa from the same module of the network had strong ecological connections, participated in C-cycles, and shared common trophic properties. PICRUSt analysis showed that bacteria were involved potentially in various essential processes; and the abundance of predicted xenobiotic biodegradation genes showed a decreasing trend in water samples from the inlet to the outlet of the reservoir. These results improve our current knowledge of the spatial distribution of bacteria in water and sediment in ecological purification reservoirs.