Metagemic Analysis of River Ganga for Micribiome and its Putative Function

Abstract

The Ganges river in India is more than 2,500 km long and has the most populated river basin in the world. However, due to continuous anthropogenic activities, the river s ecosystem is under threat. The problems would further be emphasized and likely to be far more serious in the coming years due to the accelerated pace of environmental degradation due to pollution and the impending climate change scenario. Microbial populations are sensitive to environmental and anthropogenic impacts and their resilience can be measured through spatial and temporal taxonomic and functional composition profiling. Metagenomics, or environmental genomics, is a culture and isolation independent method of studying microbial genetic material directly recovered from an environment. With this approach, compositional diversity and change can provide a sensitive tool for detection, identification and prediction of environmental conditions over space and time and in response to anthropogenic impacts. Due to pollution, microbial community are hypothesized to lead to loss of microbial diversity, changes in microbial community function and health ultimately decreasing our ecosystems quality and resilience with threats of increasing tolerance, persistence and geographic range of toxins, antibiotic resistance and opportunistic pathogens. In the present study, the structure of community microbiome in sediments of river Ganga at Kanpur, Prayagraj and Devprayag, India has been identified. newlineThe present study revealed bacterial diversity, community structure and their putative functions from polluted river sediment metagenomes. These findings will help identify bioremediating, probiotic microbes, xenobiotic, plastic degrading enzymes, and AMR genes, which will help in biotechnological and industrial applications in the future. newline