Bacterial diversity in Shahu lake, northwest China is significantly affected by nutrient composition rather than location

Shallow lakes around the world are important aquatic ecosystems, yet our understanding of the relationship between the bacterial communities and their driving forces in these habitats remains elusive. We used the Illumina MiSeq platform to meta-sequence the V3–V4 regions of 16S rRNA gene amplicons to characterize bacterial community structure and diversity in relation to environmental factors in Shahu Lake located in Yinchuan plain, northwest China. We found that Shahu Lake, as a typical representative of shallow lakes, has well-mixed water that harbors major bacterial groups including Proteobacteria, Cyanobacteria, Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Firmicutes, Verrucomicrobia, Chloroflexi, RF3, and Planctomycetes. Community structure is similar from the perspective of alpha-diversity and different in terms of beta-diversity. Compared to spatial effects, total carbon plays a more important role in shifting bacterial structure in the lake, followed by total nitrogen and total phosphorus. In summary, nutrients, rather than locations, might be a key driving force in bacterial structure shift in shallow small lakes.