Stratification modelling of key bacterial taxa driven by metabolic dynamics in meromictic lakes

In meromictic lakes, the water column is stratified into distinguishable steady layers with different physico-chemical properties. The bottom portion, known as monimolimnion, has been studied for the functional stratification of microbial populations. Recent experiments have reported the profiles of...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lauro, Federico M., Su, Haibin, Zhu, Kaicheng
Other Authors: Asian School of the Environment
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: 2018
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/86852
http://hdl.handle.net/10220/45330
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Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
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Summary:In meromictic lakes, the water column is stratified into distinguishable steady layers with different physico-chemical properties. The bottom portion, known as monimolimnion, has been studied for the functional stratification of microbial populations. Recent experiments have reported the profiles of bacterial and nutrient spatial distributions, but quantitative understanding is invoked to unravel the underlying mechanism of maintaining the discrete spatial organization. Here a reaction-diffusion model is developed to highlight the spatial pattern coupled with the light-driven metabolism of bacteria, which is resilient to a wide range of dynamical correlation between bacterial and nutrient species at the molecular level. Particularly, exact analytical solutions of the system are presented together with numerical results, in a good agreement with measurements in Ace lake and Rogoznica lake. Furthermore, one quantitative prediction is reported here on the dynamics of the seasonal stratification patterns in Ace lake. The active role played by the bacterial metabolism at microscale clearly shapes the biogeochemistry landscape of lake-wide ecology at macroscale.