Characteristic microbial communities in the continuous permafrost beside the bitumen in Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau

Although research on microorganisms in the global ecosystem has considerably increased, there is still incomplete understanding of the microbial communities in alpine permafrost due to the inaccessibility. In this study, the microbial composition and diversity in the continuous permafrost beside the bitumen in the Qiangtang basin (CPBQ) was investigated by 454 pyrosequencing. Among the bacterial communities, the phylum Actinobacteria was dominant, ranging from 33.42 to 48.04 %, followed by Proteobacteria and Acidobacteria . In addition to the three characteristic phyla, Planctomycetes , Chloroflexi , and Nitrospirae were also important in the CPBQ. Crenarchaeota , especially the ammonia-oxidizing archaea Soil Crenarchaeotic Group (SCG), was the main archaea in the CPBQ. Moreover, four fungal phyla, Ascomycota , Mucoromycotina , Chytridiomycota and Glomeromycota , were detected in the CPBQ. Mortierella , Fusarium , and Tetracladium were the main genera. On the average, the proportion of No_rank and unclassified sequences in bacteria and fungi were high at low taxonomic levels, which could extend the list of extreme environmental microbial candidate divisions. The demonstrations of the microbial communities in the CPBQ could provide key data to improve the knowledge of microbes in the terrestrial extreme environments.