Bacterial diversity is strongly associated with historical penguin activity in an antarctic lake sediment profile

Bacterial diversity is strongly associated with historical penguin activity in an Antarctic lake sediment profile 1Scientific RepoRts | 5 17231 | DOI 10 1038/srep17231 www nature com/scientificreports[.]

www.nature.com/scientificreports OPEN received: 27 July 2015 accepted: 27 October 2015 Published: 25 November 2015 Bacterial diversity is strongly associated with historical penguin activity in an Antarctic lake sediment profile Renbin Zhu1, Yu Shi2, Dawei Ma1, Can Wang1, Hua Xu2 & Haiyan Chu2 Current penguin activity in Antarctica affects the geochemistry of sediments and their microbial communities; the effects of historical penguin activity are less well understood Here, bacterial diversity in ornithogenic sediment was investigated using high-throughput pyrosequencing The relative abundances of dominant phyla were controlled by the amount of historical penguin guano deposition Significant positive correlations were found between both the bacterial richness and diversity, and the relative penguin number (p