Bacterial Community Composition and Diversity in Billing Reservoir Examined by Massive Paralelel Sequence Analysis of 16S rRNA Genes

Abstract

The Billings complex is the largest water-storage facility in São Paulo Metropolitan and indispensible resources for energy generation and water supply for about 5.4 million people. As such, the reservoir also exposed to significant pressure from anthropogenic activities, uncontrolled urbanization and inadequate sanitation infrastructure that cause serious quality degradation of surface waters in this reservoir. Definitely, organic matter plays an important role in such ecosystem, both in providing energy for the food web and in modifying water quality. The transformation, degradation, and internal production of organic matter is largely mediated by microorganisms and there is hence great interest in learning more about the ecology and function of these microscopic but abundant key players in reservoir ecosystems. The main focus of this project is thus to characterize the microbial diversity and determine the spatiotemporal pattern of variation in the microbial community of the billing reservoir. To address this objective, a yearlong survey of bacterial DNA population from water surface will be determined from 29 sites across billing reservoir using the barcoded next generation Illumina sequencing of the bacterial 16S rRNA gene. The surface samples will be collected every two months. The same 16S rRNA gene-based metagenomic approach will be utilized to investigate the bacteriome of Billings's reservoir from a single collection of deep water samples from the same 29 sites. Different bioinformatics tools will be used to process and analyze the data to define mean relative abundance of taxonomic groups, operational taxonomic unit level, potential opportunistic pathogens, estimate potential contamination and prediction of metabolic profiles. Additionally, we aim to conduct a metagenomic approach from some representative samples with abundance of cyanobacteria for identification of the genetic machinery used to synthesize cyanotoxins and reconstruct the full genome of toxic cyanobacterium from Billings.We believe that this work will provide support for future developments in water quality monitoring, both directly from the sequence data presented, which could be used to identify DNA sequence biomarkers indicative of quality conditions, and indirectly by providing context aiding design of future water quality studies.Key words: Sequencing, 16S rRNA, Microbiome (AU)