Enhanced metabolic potentials and functional gene interactions of microbial stress response towards high elevation in freshwater lakes

Here, we applied a microarray-based metagenomics technology termed GeoChip 5.0 to examined functional gene structure of microbes in four lakes at low and high elevations of approximately 530 and 4,600 m a.s.l., respectively. In this study, to investigate the influence of elevation on microbial functional genes in aquatic environments, we focused on four shallow freshwater lakes at comparable elevations, two HELs (at 4,652 m and 4,608 m, respectively) and two LELs (at 530 m and 525 m, respectively), at Siguniang Mountain in Sichuan province, China. Six sampling sites were set in each lake. At each site, approximately 1 L of water was collected from surface waters (top 50 cm) for microbial Geochip analyses