Effects of Acidification on the Changes of Microbial Diversity in Aquatic Microcosms

In an artificial pH-gradient batch culture system, the effects of acidification on the species composition of a heterotrophic bacterial community were analyzed. As a result of this study, it was found that total bacteria numbers were not affected by acidification and that the population of hetero-trophic bacteria decreased as pH became lower. The heterotrophic bacteria isolated from the entire pH gradient were 12 genera and 22 species. Among them, 64% were gram negative and 36% were gram positive bacteria. As pH decreased, the distribution rate of gram negative bacteria increased while that of gram positive bacteria decreased. The diversity of genera decreased from 13 to 5 as pH decreased from 7 to 3. The G+C content of all of the 202 isolated strains varied from 22.8 to 77.0%, and increased in interspecies of same genus as pH decreased. As a result of clustering analysis, the diversity index of species ranged from 1.13 to 2.37, and it had lower indices as pH decreased. In order to evaluate the diversity of numbers of sample of different size, a rarefaction method was used to analyze the expected number of species appearance according to pH. The statistical significance of species diversity was verified by the fact that the number decreased at lower pH.