Assessment of viral assemblages in different types of wetland water in northeast China using RAPD-PCR

Viruses are the most abundant and ubiquitous biological entities in various ecosystems, yet few investigations of viral communities in wetlands have been performed. To address this data gap, water samples from 6 wetlands were randomly collected across northeast China; viruses in the water were concentrated by sequential tangential flow filtration, and viral communities were assessed through randomly amplified polymorphic DNA-PCR (RAPD-PCR) with 4 decamer oligonucleotide primers. Principal coordinate analysis and hierarchical clustering analysis of the DNA fingerprints showed that viral community compositions differed among the water samples: communities in the 2 coastal wetlands were more similar to each other than to those in the 4 freshwater wetlands. The Shannon-Weaver index (H) and evenness index (E) of the RAPD-PCR fingerprint also differed among the 6 wetlands. Mantel test revealed that the changes in viral communities in wetland water were most closely related to the water NH4+-N and inorganic C content, followed by total K, P, C and NO3--N. DNA sequence analysis of the excised bands revealed that viruses accounted for ~40% of all sequences. Among the hit viral homologs, the majority belonged to the Microviridae. Moreover, variance partitioning analysis showed that the viral community contributed 24.58% while environmental factors explained 30.56% of the bacterial community variation, indicating that the bacterial community composition was strongly affected by both viral community and water variables. This work provides an initial outline of the viral communities from different types of wetlands in northeast China and improves our understanding of the viral diversity in these ecosystems.