Department of Marine Biology, Pukyong National University, Busan 48513, Korea.
Division of Ocean Sciences, Korea Polar Research Institute, Incheon 21990, Korea.
Genes (Basel). 2022 May 21;13(5):922. doi: 10.3390/genes13050922.
Meso- and macrozooplankton play crucial roles in the trophic web and the biological carbon pump in the ocean by transferring energy from lower to higher trophic levels and vertically exporting carbon from the surface to the deep ocean and seabed. In this study, zooplankton community structures in the Ross Sea, Antarctica, were analyzed using metabarcoding methods. Both regular barcode (RB) (using a PacBio Sequel system) and mini barcode (MB) (using the Illumina MiSeq platform) methods were utilized. As the result of a combination of the two bioinformatic pipelines used in the RB, 55 reliable haplotypes were obtained from the pooled zooplankton net samples, whereas 183 amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) were isolated from the MB metabarcoding analyses of 14 individual stations. Among these, 39 (70.9%) and 125 (90.6%) showed higher than 99% sequence identity to the database, indicating that there were sufficient reference sequences to employ metabarcoding analysis-except for several taxa, including small-sized copepods, cnidarians, and pneumodermatids. A high degree of shared taxa showed that both metabarcoding analyses were feasible for use in the analysis of zooplankton assemblages in the Ross Sea. However, RB would be more useful for the construction of a reference database due to its relatively high cost, whereas MB would be more economic for ecological surveys due to its relatively low cost (albeit, only if reference sequences were well documented using RB). Zooplankton assemblages were highly diverse in each sample site, presumably due to the narrow covered volumes of the vertical net-towed samples from polynyas in the Ross Sea. As metabarcoding data accumulate, we will gain better insights into zooplankton communities and their ecological implications in the Ross Sea.
中尺度和大尺度浮游动物通过将能量从低营养级转移到高营养级，并将碳从表层垂直输出到深海和海底，在海洋的营养网和生物碳泵中发挥着至关重要的作用。本研究利用宏条形码（MB）（Illumina MiSeq 平台）和微条形码（RB）（PacBio Sequel 系统）两种条形码方法，对南极罗斯海的浮游动物群落结构进行了分析。通过对 RB 中使用的两种生物信息学流程的组合，从混合浮游动物网样本中获得了 55 个可靠的单倍型，而从 14 个单独站位的 MB 宏条形码分析中分离出了 183 个扩增子序列变异（ASVs）。其中，有 39 个（70.9%）和 125 个（90.6%）与数据库的序列同一性高于 99%，表明有足够的参考序列可用于宏条形码分析——除了一些类群，包括小型桡足类、刺胞动物和充气动物。高共享类群表明，两种宏条形码分析都可用于分析罗斯海的浮游动物组合。然而，由于其相对较高的成本，RB 更有利于构建参考数据库，而由于其相对较低的成本（仅当使用 RB 对参考序列进行了很好的记录），MB 更有利于生态调查。每个采样点的浮游动物组合都具有高度的多样性，这可能是由于罗斯海冰间湖的垂直拖网样本的覆盖体积较窄所致。随着宏条形码数据的积累，我们将更好地了解罗斯海中浮游动物群落及其生态意义。
