Equatorial Pacific Ocean Targeted loci environmental

To (i) document vertical distributions of bacterial diversity and community composition, (ii) investigate how these communities vary from one oceanographic region to another, and (iii) test the extent to which bacterial communities of deep subseafloor sediment may originate in the water column, we used 454 pyrosequencing technology and the v4-v6 hypervariable region of the bacterial 16S rRNA gene to examine bacterial community composition (presence/absence and relative abundance) in the water column, near-seafloor sediment (5 cm), and subseafloor sediment at three environmentally distinct Pacific sites: the very high-productivity eastern equatorial upwelling region (EQP1), the moderately high-productivity open-ocean central equatorial upwelling region (EQP8) and the very low-productivity northern gyre (EQP11) (Figure 1).