Table 1.
Environmental parameters and nutrients content of seawater.
Fig 1.
Representative field-emission scanning electron microscope (FESEM) images of acrylic coupons deployed in the intake area of a power plant located in the Laccadive Sea for different durations (1, 3, 6, 9, 12 and 15 days).
Images display an increase in biofilm biomass and exopolymeric substance (EPS) with increasing time.
Fig 2.
Alpha diversity indices of biofilm-forming and seawater-associated bacterial communities.
Images displaying diversity, richness, and evenness of marine biofilms assembled on three artificial substrata viz., stainless steel (SS), titanium (Ti) and high-density polyethylene (HP) and peripheral seawater (SW) collected during day-1 to day-15 from the southern coastal region of India.
Fig 3.
Principal coordinate analysis (PCoA) plots showing variation in biofilm-forming and seawater-associated bacterial communities collected for consecutively 15 days from the southern coastal region of India.
a) PCoA plot displaying clustering pattern based on unweighted UniFrac (take presence/absence matrix in the account). b) PCoA plot displaying clustering pattern based on weighted UniFrac (take abundance in the account). Coloured circles in the PCoA plots represent the days of marine biofilms and seawater sampling.
Fig 4.
Temporal dynamics of the relative abundance of biofilm-forming bacterial communities.
a) Spearman correlation plots of six dominant bacterial phyla over days. “R” represents the Spearman correlation coefficient. b) Stacked bar plots showing the relative abundance of dominant taxonomic groups at order level. Only those taxonomic groups that constitute for more than 0.5% of the total community are shown.
Fig 5.
Hierarchically clustered heatmap analysis of the bacterial community composition in the biofilm and seawater samples collected on different days.
Figure shows the clustering of seawater samples separately from the biofilm samples and the colours represent the relative abundance of the top abundant 50 genera.
Fig 6.
Bar plot and cladogram depicting the results of LEfSe analysis that identified the significantly differed taxa between biofilm and seawater bacterial community composition.
Bacterial taxa with linear discriminant analysis (LDA) score greater than 3 are displayed in the figures.