Project description:Subterranean estuaries (STEs) modulate the chemical composition of continental groundwater before it reaches the coast, but their microbial community is poorly known. Here, we explored the microbial ecology of two neighbouring, yet contrasting STEs (Panxón and Ladeira STEs; Ría de Vigo, NW Iberian Peninsula). We investigated microbial composition (16S rRNA gene sequencing), abundance, heterotrophic production and their geochemical drivers. A total of 10,150 OTUs and 59 phyla were retrieved from porewater sampled during four surveys covering each STE seepage face. In both STEs, we find a very diverse microbial community composed by abundant cosmopolitans and locally restricted rare taxa. Porewater oxygen and dissolved organic matter are the main environmental predictors of microbial community composition. More importantly, the high variety of benthic microbiota links to biogeochemical processes of different elements in STEs. The oxygen-rich Panxón beach showed strong associations of the ammonium oxidizing archaea Nitrosopumilales with the heterotrophic community, thus acting as a net source of nitrogen to the coast. On the other hand, the prevailing anoxic conditions of Ladeira beach promoted the dominance of anaerobic heterotrophs related to the degradation of complex and aromatic compounds, such as Dehalococcoidia and Desulfatiglans, and the co-occurrence of methane oxidizers and methanogens.
Project description:Extinction models generally predict that coastal and neritic fauna benefit during sea-level rise (transgression), whereas sea-level retreat (regression) diminishes their suitable habitat area and promotes evolutionary bottlenecks. Sea-level change also impacts terrestrial island biogeography, but it remains a challenge to evidence how sea-level rise impacts aquatic island biogeography, especially in the subterranean realm. Karst subterranean estuaries (KSEs) occur globally on carbonate islands and platforms, and they are populated by globally-dispersed, ancient ecosystems (termed anchialine). Anchialine fauna currently exhibit a disjunct biogeography that cannot be completely explained by plate tectonic-imposed vicariance. Here we provide evidence that anchialine ecosystems can experience evolutionary bottlenecks caused by habitat reduction during transgression events. Marine-adapted anchialine fauna benefit from habitat expansion during transgressions, but fresh- and brackish-adapted fauna must emigrate, evolve to accommodate local habitat changes, or are regionally eliminated. Phanerozoic transgressions relative to long-term changes in subsidence and relief of regional lithology must be considered for explaining biogeography, evolution, local extirpation or complete extinction of anchialine fauna. Despite the omission of this entire category of environments and animals in climate change risk assessments, the results indicate that anchialine fauna on low-lying islands and platforms that depend upon meteoric groundwater are vulnerable to habitat changes caused by 21st century sea-level rise.
Project description:We performed RNAseq, metabolomics and pathway enrichment analysis on cardiac tissue from naked mole-rats (Heterocephalus glaber) and from seven other members of African mole rat genera, Cape mole-rat (Georychus capensis), Cape dune mole-rat (Bathyergus suillus), Common mole-rat (Cryptomys hottentotus hottentotus), Natal mole-rat (C. h. natalenesis), Mahali mole rat (C. h. mahali), Highveld mole-rat (C. h. pretoriae) and Damaraland mole-rats (Fukomys damarensis) representing differing burrow and soil types, degrees of sociality, lifespan and hypoxia tolerance. In addition, we include the evolutionarily highly divergent hottentot golden mole (Ambysomus hottentotus), an Afrotherian subterranean, solitary mammal, and the C57/BL6 laboratory mouse as a standard mammal control. After RNA sequencing, we removed the reads mapped to rRNAs and get rawdata, then we filtered the low quality reads (More than 20% of the bases qualities are lower than 10), reads with adaptors and reads with unknown bases (N bases more than 5%) to get the clean reads. These are the data uploaded.
Project description:Industrial anaerobic digestion (AD) represents a relevant energy source beyond today’s fossil fuels, wherein organic matter is recycled to methane gas via an intricate and complex microbial food web. Despite its potential, anaerobic reactors often undergo process instability over time, mainly caused by substrate composition perturbations, making the system unreliable for stable energy production. To ensure the reliability of AD technologies, it is crucial to identify microbial- and system responses to better understand the effect of such perturbations and ultimately detect signatures indicative of process failure . Here, we investigate the effect of microalgal organic loading rate (OLR) on the fermentation products profile, microbiome dynamics, and disruption/recovery of major microbial metabolisms. Reactors subjected to low- and high-OLR disturbances were operated and monitored for fermentation products and biogas production over time, while microbial responses were investigated via 16S rRNA gene amplicon data, shotgun metagenomics and metagenome-centric metaproteomics.
Project description:The microbiome has revealed itself as a key player in health and disease. To better understand its role, in addition to microbial diversity, it is important to understand species-specific activity and gene expression. While metatranscriptomics investigates mRNA abundance2, it does not inform about faster post-transcriptional regulation3. Although prokaryotic translation is a common target for antibiotics, a direct measurement of microbiome ribosome dynamics remains inaccessible. Here we demonstrate that, contrary to expectation, co-translational mRNA degradation is common in prokaryotes, and that in vivo ribosome protection generates widespread 3-nt periodicity in 5´P mRNA decay intermediates. Consequently, 5´P sequencing allows the study of codon and gene specific ribosome stalling in response to stress and drug treatment at single nucleotide resolution. We validate its wide applicability by investigating in vivo species-specific ribosome footprints of clinical and environmental microbiomes and show that amino acid-specific ribosome protection patterns can be used to phenotype microbiome perturbations. Furthermore, we show that multiple RNase activities collaborate to generate in vivo ribosome footprints and that co-translational degradation is phylogenetically conserved across prokaryotes. This strategy opens the way for the study of the metatranslatome, and allows to investigate fast species-specific post-transcriptional responses to environmental and chemical perturbations in unculturable microbial communities.