Microbial biodiversity in the southern Indian Ocean and Southern Ocean

• Main Author: Flaviani, Flavia
• Other Authors: Rybicki, Edward P, Schroeder, Declan, Pfaff, Maya C
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: University of Cape Town 2017
• Subjects: Molecular and Cell Biology; Indian; Southern Ocean
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/25058; https://open.uct.ac.za/bitstream/11427/25058/1/thesis_sci_2017_flaviani_flavia.pdf

The multi-phylotype and ecologically important community of microbes in aquatic environments ranges from the numerically dominant viruses to the diverse climate-change regulating phytoplankton. Recent advances in next generation sequencing are starting to reveal the true diversity and biological complexity of this previously invisible component of Earth's hydrosphere. An increased awareness of this microbiome's importance has led to the rise of microbial studies with marine environmental samples being collected and sequenced daily around the globe. Despite the rapid advancement in knowledge of marine microbial diversity, technical difficulties have constrained the ability to perform basin wide physical and chemical oceanographic assessments in tandem with microbiological screening with the majority of studies only looking at a single component of the microbial community. In this study the full microbial diversity, from viruses to protists, was characterised within the southern Indian Ocean and the Southern Ocean from a small volume of seawater collected using the same CTD equipment used by oceanographers. Throughout this study it will be demonstrated how this small volume is sufficient to describe the core microbial taxa in the marine environment. The application of a bespoke bioinformatics pipeline, integrated with sequencing replication, improved the description of the dominant core microbiome whilst removing OTUs present due to PCR and sequencing artefacts thereby improving the accurate description of rare phylotypes. Analyses confirmed the dominance of Cyanobacteria, Alphaproteobacteria and Gammaproteobacteria in the pelagic prokaryotic microbiome, while the Stramenopiles-Alveolata-Rhizaria (SAR) cluster dominates the eukaryotic microbiome. A decrease in the SAR community will be reported for the Southern Ocean with a concomitant increase in the haptophyte community. Whilst the virome confirmed the dominance of tailed phages and giant viruses across all stations, there was a significant variation ...