Metagenomic study of bacterial diversity in Caves of Mizoram, Northeast India. Cave bacterial diversity

High throughput paired end illumina sequencing of V4 region of 16S rRNA gene was performed to systematically evaluate the bacterial community of three historically important cave sediments situated in Champai district of Mizoram, Northeast India. A total of 10,643 operational taxonomic units (based on 97% cutoff) comprising 21 bacterial phyla and 21 candidate phyla with a sequencing depth of 11, 40013 were found in this study. The taxonomic profile obtained by BLAST against RDP classifier and Greengenes OTUs database reveals a high diversity within bacteria mainly dominated by Planctomycetes, Actinobacteria, Proteobacteria, Bacteroidetes, and Firmicutes while members of archea were less diverse and dominated by Verrumicrobia and Ekkaryoarchea.