Analysis of Bacterial Communities of King George and Deception Islands, Antarctica using High-Throughput Sequencing

Abstract

King George Island (KGI) and Deception Island (DCI) are members of the South Shetland Islands in Antarctica, each with their own landscape and local environmental factors. Both sites are suitable for longterm monitoring of bacterial diversity shift due to warming, as temperature rises relatively faster than East Antarctica. This study was conducted to determine and compare the baseline diversity of soil bacteria in KGI and DCI. 16S rDNA amplicons of bacteria from both sites were sequenced using Illumina next generation sequencer. Results showed that major phyla in KGI and DCI were Actinobacteria, Proteobacteria, Chloroflexi, Verrucomicrobia, Bacteriodetes and Acidobacteria. The distribution and evenness of the soil bacterial communities varied at genus level. The genera Sphingomonas sp. was predominant at both sites while the subsequent six major genera differed. Two bacterial genera, Legionella and Clostridium were also found in low abundance in both sites, both of which may contain pathogenic members. Further verification will be required to determine whether the pathogenic members of these genera are present in both sites.

Exploring the plant environmental DNA diversity in soil from two sites on Deception Island (Antarctica, South Shetland Islands) using metabarcoding

“…Few Antarctic studies to date have applied metabarcoding, and these have so far focused almost exclusively on microorganisms such as bacteria, algae, fungi and cyanobacteria (Chua et al 2018, Garrido-Benavent et al 2020, Rosa et al 2020a, 2020b, Câmara et al 2021, Newsham et al 2021. Only Fraser et al (2018) presented data including terrestrial plant sequences.…”

Metagenomic profile of the taxonomic classification and functional diversity of soil bacterial population in the Veerakkal forest area, Western Ghats, India

“…Chua et al (2018) analyzed the bacterial genomic DNA concentration (34.3 µg/µl) from King George Island and Deception Island (6.1 µg/µl) from the soil samples in Antarctica which indicated higher ranges than the present ndings. Here, the genomic DNA purity of PP and TA samples were 1.94 and 1.85, based on the A 260/280 ratio which occurred within the required range of 1.80-2.00(Zhou et al, 1996) that indicating the suitable extraction method used in the study and were most suitable for soil samples.…”

“…It might be attributed to an increase in the microbial diversity in the study sites. Further,Chua et al (2018) and Rawat and Joshi (2019) evaluated the average Shannon indices from Antarctica and Uttarakhand of soil samples(4.3 and 4.76). The observed ranges were lower when compared to the present ndings.Functional diversity analysisThe PICRUSt method was used to identify putative functions encoded in the bacterial genomes with sequenced 16S rRNA gene segments.…”