Evaluating bacterial community structures in oil collected from the sea surface and sediment in the northern Gulf of Mexico after the deepwater horizon oil spill

MicrobiologyOpen 2013; 2(3): 492–504 doi: 10.1002/mbo3.89 On page 496, under the heading “Bacterial community in sediment and sediment overlying water”, the terms SC and SG have been wrongly swapped in some places. The paragraph should read like the following: The pyrosequencing identified diverse bacterial groups in sediments from stations SG and SC, with 111 and 95 genera from 16 and 14 phyla, respectively (Table 1). In comparison, bacteria in the overlying water of SC sediment (SC-OW) were much less diverse, with 35 genera from 3125 OTUs. The bacterial communities in SG and SC sediments consisted mainly of proteobacteria, accounting for 64.1% and 69.3% of total bacteria, respectively (Table 1). Gamma- and Alphaproteobacteria together accounted for a major fraction of the proteobacteria in SG (42.5%) and SC (52.7%) sediments, whereas the Betaproteobacteria represented only 1.2–1.5% (Fig. 2). In the SC overlying water, proteobateria represented 87.6% of total OTUs (1601), of which Betaproteobacteria accounted for 51.2%, and Gamma- and Alphaproteobacteria together represented 34.4%. In addition, Bacteroidetes, Actinobacteria, and Planctomycetes occurred in all sediments and in overlying water. Cluster analysis showed that bacterial community structures of SC and SG sediments were similar, but those of the SC overlying water were different than the sediment communities (Fig. 3). The six places corrected are in bold type. The authors apologize for this and regret this oversight.