Microbial ecology of coastal northern Gulf of Mexico waters

Abstract

Estuarine and coastal ecosystems are of high economic and ecological importance, owing to their diverse communities and the disproportionate role they play in carbon cycling, particularly in carbon sequestration. Organisms inhabiting these environments must overcome strong natural fluctuations in salinity, nutrients, and turbidity as well as numerous climate change-induced disturbances such as land loss, sea level rise, and, in some locations, increasingly severe tropical cyclones that threaten to disrupt future ecosystem health. The northern Gulf of Mexico (nGoM) along the Louisiana coast contains dozens of estuaries, including the Mississippi-Atchafalaya River outflow, which dramatically influence the region due to their vast upstream watershed. Nevertheless, the microbiology of these estuaries and surrounding coastal environments have received little attention. To improve our understanding of microbial ecology in the understudied coastal nGoM, we conducted a 16S rRNA gene amplicon survey at eight sites and multiple timepoints along the Louisiana coast and one inland swamp spanning freshwater to high brackish salinities, totaling 47 duplicated Sterivex (0.2-2.7 {micro}m) and prefilter (> 2.7 {micro}m) samples. We cataloged over 13,000 ASVs from common freshwater and marine clades such as SAR11 (Alphaproteobacteria), Synechococcus (Cyanobacteria), and acI and Candidatus Actinomarina (Actinobacteria). We observed preferences for freshwater or marine habitats in many organisms and also characterized a group of taxa with specialized distributions across brackish water sites, supporting the hypothesis of an endogenous brackish-water community. Additionally, we observed brackish-water preferences for several aquatic clades typically considered marine or freshwater taxa, such as SAR11 subclade II, SAR324, and the acI Actinobacteria. The data presented here expand the geographic coverage of microbial ecology in estuarine communities, help delineate the autochthonous and allochthonous members of these environments, and provide critical aquatic microbiological baseline data for coastal and estuarine sites in the nGoM.