Bacterial community structure of the high-altitude brackish water Pangong Lake located in the Indian trans-Himalayas

Here, we explored bacterial diversity of the Pangong lake sediment, water and microbial mat samples (n=6). V3-V4 region of 16S rRNA gene was used for amplicon sequencing using illumina Miseq. Standard QIIME pipeline was used for analysis and metabolic potential of the microbial community was predicted using functional prediction tool Piphilin and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) database. Bacterial phyla Proteobacteria followed by Bacteroidetes, Acidobacteria, Planctomycetes, Actinobacteria and Firmicutes were found to be dominant across the samples. Shannon’s and Simpson’s alpha diversity analysis revealed sediment community being most diverse and water community being the least diverse while beta diversity analysis using PCoA analysis showed significant variation in the bacterial community of the water, sediment and microbial mat samples.