16S rRNA amplicon sequencing in the Hudson Bay estuaries

Understanding the factors shaping bacterial communities is a goal in ecological sciences and these factors in cold water systems are little known. Microbial assemblages are largely determined by environmental conditions and there is a clear divide between typical freshwater and marine communities. We compared the highly regulated Nelson River with the much less impacted Churchill River, two river-to-sea systems, in western Hudson Bay (Canada), by using high-throughput amplicon sequencing (16S rRNA) and a distance based redundancy analysis to have a better understanding on the environmental factors shaping bacterial communities, providing the first detailed portrait of the composition and spatial distribution of bacterioplankton communities in the Churchill and Nelson River estuaries and near-shore Hudson Bay.