16S rDNA Community Survey of High Elevation Alpine Lakes

High-elevation mountain ecosystems are extremely susceptible to environmental changes such as climate warming and increased nutrient deposition. These factors provide researchers with a unique opportunity to explore the ecological processes which control the assembly and structure of microbial communities in high-elevation ecosystems. Some work has been done studying the microbial communities of the alpine lakes in the Colorado Rockies. However, most of the microbial community research in the Rockies has focused on the eukaryotic communities using non-molecular based techniques. We used Illumina high-throughput sequencing to conduct a comprehensive molecular analysis of the microbial communities of alpine lakes by sequencing 16S ribosomal sequences. These data were used to analyze how the microbial communities of eight different alpine lakes over four years (2014-2017) are structured between its inlet and outlet, through its water column, and over the course of the of the alpine growing season. Improving our understanding of microbial community structure and assembly can provide researchers with information on how microbial communities naturally assemble and respond to environmental changes.