Recovery of 1887 metagenome-assembled genomes from the South China Sea

Abstract

The South China Sea (SCS) is a marginal sea characterized by strong land-sea biogeochemical interactions. SCS has a distinctive landscape with a multitude of seamounts in its basin. Seamounts create "seamount effects" that influence the diversity and distribution of planktonic microorganisms in the surrounding oligotrophic waters. Although the vertical distribution and community structure of marine microorganisms have been explored in certain regions of the global ocean, there is a lack of comprehensive microbial genomic surveys for uncultured microorganisms in SCS, particularly in the seamount regions. Here, we employed a metagenomic approach to study the uncultured microbial communities sampled from the Xianbei seamount region to the North Coast waters of SCS. A total of 1887 non-redundant prokaryotic metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) were reconstructed, of which, 153 MAGs were classified as high-quality MAGs based on the MIMAG standards. The community structure and genomic information provided by this dataset could be used to analyze microbial distribution and metabolism in the SCS.

Fig. 1

Sampling sites in the Xianbei, Xisha and Dongsha areas in SCS. The red dots shown in the upper subplot were stations with samples taken from multiple water depths as shown in the lower panel. XB: Xianbei, XS: Xisha, and DS: Dongsha.

Fig. 2

Relative abundances of microbial communities in the Xianbei, Xisha and Dongsha areas of SCS. The relative abundances of different taxa were assessed based on 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing across different areas (a) or across depths in the Xianbei seamount region (b). Detailed relative abundance and 16S rRNA gene taxonomy information can be found in Table S2.

Fig. 3

The phylogenomic tree of 1887 MAGs recovered from this study. The maximum likelihood tree was reconstructed based on the concatenated alignment of 41 single-copy marker genes. Numbers in the parenthesis after each phylum name indicate the number of recovered MAGs from this phylum. Branches with bootstrap values >0.95 were highlighted with black dots. Detailed MAG taxonomy assignment, associated with completeness and contamination information can be found in Table S3.