Roles of sulfate-reducing bacteria in sustaining the diversity and stability of marine bacterial community

Microbes play central roles in ocean food webs and global biogeochemical processes. Yet, the information available regarding the highly diverse bacterial communities in these systems is not comprehensive. Here we investigated the diversity, assembly process, and species coexistence frequency of bacterial communities in seawater and sediment across ∼600 km of the eastern Chinese marginal seas using 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing. Our analyses showed that compared with seawater, bacterial communities in sediment possessed higher diversity and experienced tight phylogenetic distribution. Neutral model analysis showed that the relative contribution of stochastic processes to the assembly process of bacterial communities in sediment was lower than that in seawater. Functional prediction results showed that sulfate-reducing bacteria (SRB) were enriched in the core bacterial sub-communities. The bacterial diversities of both sediment and seawater were positively associated with the relative abundance of SRB. Co-occurrence analysis showed that bacteria in seawater exhibited a more complex interaction network and closer co-occurrence relationships than those in sediment. The SRB of seawater were centrally located in the network and played an essential role in sustaining the complex network. In addition, further analysis indicated that the SRB of seawater helped maintain the high stability of the bacterial network. Overall, this study provided further comprehensive information regarding the characteristics of bacterial communities in the ocean, and provides new insights into keystone taxa and their roles in sustaining microbial diversity and stability in ocean.