SRA

Riverine ecosystems are biogeochemical powerhouses driven largely by microbial communities that inhabit water columns and sediments. To gain a more broad understanding of the ecological and anthropogenic implications of river microbial consortia, we investigated the metagenomes of eleven rivers across three continents using MinION™ nanopore sequencing. Up to 10 Gb of data per run were generated with average read lengths of 3.4 kb. Diversity and diagnosis of river function potential was accomplished with 0.5-1.0×106 long reads. Our observations for seven of the eleven rivers conformed to previous findings and we exposed previously unrecognized microbial biodiversity in the other four rivers. Deeper understanding that emerged is that rivers' microbial consortia and the ecological functions they fulfil did not align with geographic location but instead indicated ecological responses to urban and other anthropogenic effects, and that changes in taxa were manifest over a very short geographic space.