Core Functional Traits of Bacterial Communities in the Upper Mississippi River Show Limited Variation in Response to Land Cover Christopher Staley1, Trevor J. Gould1,2, Ping Wang1, Jane Phillips2, James B. Cotner3, and Michael J. Sadowsky1,4,* 1BioTechnology Institute, 2Biology Program, 3Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, and 4Department of Soil, Water and Climate, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN Running title: Functional diversity of Mississippi River bacteria *Corresponding Author: Michael J. Sadowsky, BioTechnology Institute, University of Minnesota, 140 Gortner Lab, 1479 Gortner Ave, Saint Paul, MN 55108; Phone: (612)-624-2706, Email:
[email protected] 1 1 Abstract 2 Taxonomic characterization of environmental microbial communities via high-throughput DNA 3 sequencing has revealed that patterns in microbial biogeography affect community structure. 4 However, shifts in functional diversity related to variation in taxonomic composition are poorly 5 understood. To overcome limitations due to the prohibitive cost of high-depth metagenomic 6 sequencing, tools to infer functional diversity based on phylogenetic distributions of functional 7 traits have been developed. In this study we characterized functional microbial diversity at 11 8 sites along the Mississippi River in Minnesota using both metagenomic sequencing and 9 functional-inference-based (PICRUSt) approaches. This allowed us to determine how distance 10 and variation in land cover throughout the river influenced the distribution of functional traits, as 11 well