Bacteria and Metabolic Potential in Karst Caves Revealed by Intensive Bacterial Cultivation and Genome Assembly
Hai-Zhen Zhu, Zhifeng Zhang, Nan Zhou, Cheng‐Ying Jiang, Baojun Wang, Lei Cai, Hongmei Wang, Shuang‐Jiang Liu
Abstract
Karst caves are oligotrophic environments that are dark and humid and have a relatively stable annual temperature. The diversity of bacteria and their metabolisms are crucial for understanding the biogeochemical cycling in cave ecosystems. We integrated large-scale bacterial cultivation with metagenomic data mining to explore the compositions and metabolisms of the microbiomes in two karst cave systems. Our results reveal the presence of a highly diversified cave bacterial community, and 14 new bacterial species were described and their genomes sequenced. In this study, we obtained the most intensive collection of cultivated microbial resources from karst caves to date and predicted the various important routes for the biogeochemical cycling of elements in cave ecosystems.