Abstract:
Microbial communities (bacteria and archaea) are ubiquitous in environmental systems and regulate a range of ecosystem services. Due to difficulties related to the cultivation of the 99% of microbial communities in the laboratory, very little is known regarding the precise mechanisms that allow microbial guilds to fulfill their ecological roles. Culture-independent approaches have allowed us to bypass the cultivation bottleneck, and in doing so generated vast sequence datasets that have offered crucial insights into microbial metabolic potential. The Southern Ocean (SO) accounts for 40% of all oceanic carbon cycling, which makes it the largest sink of carbon globally. There is evidence to suggest that microbial communities (predominantly archaea) are significant mediators in the cycling of carbon, nitrogen and sulphur through chemolithoautotrophic pathways. To better understand the physiological roles of archaea, we aim to reconstruct archaeal genomes from SO metagenomes. Shotgun metagenomes will be constructed from samples recovered from deep-sea metagenomes collected from two monitoring lines (Good Hope and Crossroads). Metagenome specific computational binning approaches will be applied to the resultant reads prior to assembly. Draft genomes will be reconstructed and annotated to elucidate the physiological potential of archaea implicated in biogeochemical cycling in the SO.
