A Multi-season Investigation of Microbial Extracellular Enzyme Activities in Two Temperate Coastal North Carolina Rivers: Evidence of Spatial but Not Seasonal Patterns.

ABSTRACT: Riverine systems are important sites for the production, transport, and transformation of organic matter. Much of the organic matter processing is carried out by heterotrophic microbial communities, whose activities may be spatially and temporally variable. In an effort to capture and evaluate some of this variability, we sampled four sites-two upstream and two downstream-at each of two North Carolina rivers (the Neuse River and the Tar-Pamlico River) ca. twelve times over a time period of 20 months from 2010 to 2012. At all of the sites and dates, we measured the activities of extracellular enzymes used to hydrolyze polysaccharides and peptides, and thus to initiate heterotrophic carbon processing. We additionally measured bacterial abundance, bacterial production, phosphatase activities,

SUBMITTER: Bullock A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5743733 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature