ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Microbiol.
Sec. Microbiological Chemistry and Geomicrobiology
This article is part of the Research TopicMicrobial Involvement in Biogeochemical Cycling and Contaminant Transformations at Land-Water Ecotones, Volume 3View all articles
Bacteria-Archaea Metabolic Complementarity as a Driver of Ecosystem Functioning in Chinese Coastal Sediments
Provisionally accepted
- Shandong University, Jinan, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
The East China Sea (ECS), a continental shelf sea influenced by Yangtze River discharge and human activities, hosts highly diverse and structurally heterogeneous microbial assemblages in shallow sediments, shaped by complex hydrological and biogeochemical gradients. Here, 16S rRNA gene high-throughput sequencing and environmental parameter analysis across three depth intervals (50 m, 50-100 m, 100-200 m) were used to systematically characterize the vertical distribution of bacterial and archaeal communities. Multivariate statistics identified organic carbon, oxygen, and sulfur availability as key drivers of microbial community structure. Co-occurrence network and functional profiling uncovered distinct ecological divergence: bacteria dominate oxidative processes including nitrogen and sulfur cycling as well as organic matter degradation, while archaea, predominantly Bathyarchaeia, occupy modular anaerobic niches specialized in methanogenesis and reductive pathways. This functional complementarity sustains integrated biogeochemical cycling in dynamic marine sediments. Our study advances understanding of prokaryotic community responses to vertical environmental gradients and their ecological roles in coastal sediment biogeochemical cycling.
Keywords: Archaea, Bacteria, biogeochemical cycling, marine sediment, metabolic complementarity, methane cycling
Received: 12 Jan 2026; Accepted: 02 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Yuan, Liu, Ye, Ni and Wang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Zhi-Bin Wang
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.