Diversity and Functional Profile of Bacterial Communities at Lancaster Acid Mine Drainage Dam, South Africa

AMD environments have been a subject of intensive microbial ecology studies. Owing to their biological and geochemical simplicity, AMD environments are perceived as ideal model systems for discerning the microbial ecology, processes and interaction networks in natural microbial assemblages. In this present work, the diversity and taxonomic composition of planktonic and benthic bacterial communities from an AMD containment dam were characterized using amplicon gene sequencing targeting the 16S rRNA gene.