Microbial evolution and ecology in subzero hypersaline environments

• Main Author: Cooper, Zachary Shane
• Other Authors: Deming, Jody W
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: Astrobiology; Bioinformatics; Ecology; Evolution; Microbiology; Oceanography; Biological oceanography; Genetics; Antarctic; Arctic; Arctic Ocean; The Antarctic; Antarc*; Ice; permafrost; Sea ice
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1773/48545

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2021 Microbial life, particularly prokaryotic life, is prevalent in the extreme polar settings of cryopeg and sea ice brines. Cryopegs are unfrozen layers, found in Arctic permafrost below the active layer, that are composed of relict marine sediments and their seawater-derived brines. Sea ice brines are the inhabitable liquid fraction of the contemporary ice that forms from seawater annually across the Arctic Ocean and along the Antarctic coastline. These environments each host microbial communities that contend with subzero temperatures and high salt concentrations, which present significant challenges to metabolic reaction rates and cellular stability. A major contrast between these environments is the period of exposure to stressors experienced by the inhabitants. Cryopegs remain geophysically stable under subzero hypersaline conditions over millennia while sea ice is relatively ephemeral with its brines generally lasting less than a year. The evolutionary processes that have allowed organisms to prevail in these extreme environments are deeply intertwined with the ecology of these ecosystems. This dissertation explores this entanglement by quantifying the genetic and genomic patterns of these ecosystems. Chapter 1 introduces the ideas that motivated the hypotheses driving the subsequent work aimed at understanding prokaryotic life in subzero brine environments. Chapter 2 uses environmental amplicon sequencing to explore the biodiversity of microbial communities inhabiting sea ice and cryopeg brines and assesses the observed patterns in the context of the defining environmental physics and chemistry. Chapter 3 employs cutting-edge metagenomic sequencing technology to explore evolutionary patterns of microdiversity that are prevalent in the reconstructed genomes of bacterial populations in situ, and Chapter 4 uses pangenomics to assess the evolutionary history and metabolic capabilities of Marinobacter species, the predominant bacteria inhabiting cryopeg brines. ...