(1) The 1597th Biological Symposium, Friday, August 31, 2012, 09:30-10:30, Place: Seminar room - Library 3F:B301
Speaker: John Archer (CBRC (Computational Bioscience Research Center),
KAUST (King Abudallah University of Science and Technology), Thuwal, Saudi Arabia)
Title: Comparative analysis of the Red Sea Microbiome suggests a possible route for adaptation of marine microbial populations to the effects of global warming
Summary:
Photosynthetic and autotrophic carbon and nitrogen fixation by marine microbes plays a fundamental role in the biogeochemical cycle. Studies indicate that this balance has been disturbed by climate change as increased sea surface temperatures are associated with widespread decline in phytoplankton populations. In addition, there is mounting evidence of an increase in salinity in equatorial latitudes and in the Mediterranean sea suggesting that, if current global trends in temperature rise persist, some important marine environments will be hotter and more saline in the future. The Red Sea exhibits consistent salinity, temperature and insolation characteristics that are in line with the most extreme climate change predictions and therefore its microbiome may, to an extent, be regarded as a natural model to understand the consequences of a rise in sea surface temperature and overall salinity. To determine how the Red Sea microbiome has accommodated these extreme conditions relative to other marine environments, we carried out a cultivation-independent, whole-genome pyrosequencing survey of a 1.5 km vertical transect of the central Red Sea. We then made a comprehensive comparison of the Red Sea data with surveys of the Antarctic, Atlantic and Pacific. We observe an 18 fold reduction in taxonomic diversity with massive loss of prokaryotic and eukaryotic groups but an increase in archeal taxa. Our conclusions are based on the largestvolume of data available to date (28 million sequence reads) combined with a comprehensive data analysis in which we compiled a common gene annotation ofthe Red Sea, Pacific, Atlantic and Antarctic data to generate a consistent taxonomic and metabolic information dataset. Comparative analysis of these data reveals that the high temperature, high salinity adapted Red Sea microbiome exhibits significantly reduced Prokaryotic diversity and increased Archaeal diversity. The overall impact such adaptations would have
on the global carbon cycle are, however, unclear.
