Environmental Factors Shape Water Microbial Community Structure and Function in Shrimp Cultural Enclosure Ecosystems

The effects of environmental factors on water microbial communities have been extensively studied, but little is known about the effects in shrimp cultural enclosure ecosystems. We analyzed 16S rRNA gene amplicons to determine the principal environmental factors that shape the structure and function of microbial communities in shrimp cultural enclosure ecosystems from Guangdong and Hainan provinces, in China. High quality sequences were clustered into operational taxonomic units (OTUs) at the 97% similarity level, generating 659–1,835 OTUs per sample. The 10 most abundant phyla were Proteobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Cyanobacteria, Planctomycetes, Actinobacteria, Verrucomicrobia, Firmicutes, Chlorobi, Chloroflexi, and Chlamydiae. The results of canonical correspondence analyses (CCA) indicated that salinity, total phosphate (TP), total nitrogen (TN), temperature, and pH were the most important factors shaping microbial community structure. Differences in microbial community structure between high and low salinity samples were explained by changes in the relative abundances of some OTUs (e.g., OTU5, OTU19, OTU21, OTU39, and OTU71). Moreover, the contribution of spatial distribution to the microbial community assembly was investigated via aggregated boosted tree (ABT) analyses, and the results indicated spatial isolation was not a major factor affecting the phylogenetic diversity and phylotypes of water microbial communities. Furthermore, we predicted water microbial community functional profiling using the PICRUSt program and principal component analyses (PCA) suggested that salinity was a major contributor to the structure and function of the microbial communities. Collectively, these results showed that environmental factors influenced the structure and function of water microbial communities, while salinity was the principal environmental factor instead of temperature, TP, TN, and pH in shrimp cultural enclosure ecosystems.