Abstract
Glacial lakes and their sediments are highly sensitive temporal markers of environmental variability. The combination of particular geographical conditions with climate changes makes the Múlajökull lakes an appropriate model for revealing some site-specific and common relationships in psychrophilic microbial ecology. The aim of this study was to evaluate the taxonomic and functional diversity of microbial community structures in five glacial lake sediments situated at different distances from the glacier, i.e., 50 m to 1750 m from the ice margin. The Shannon diversity indices varied in the range from 1.99 to 2.94 (with the lowest in C sample) tested by EcoPlates™ and from 1.69 to 1.89 at the phylum level (with the lowest in A sample) tested by the shotgun metagenomic sequencing, respectively. An inter-sample comparison was also conducted. Overall, six bacteria phyla (Proteobacteria, Cyanobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Actinobacteria, Verrucomicrobia and Planctomycetes) and one microalgae phyla (Bacillariophyta) were detected in five lake sediments tested at abundancy that exceeded 1%. Obtained data brings new knowledge related to the cold biosphere on the local and global Earth systems.
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Acknowledgements
The expedition to Iceland was realized in cooperation with SIA Armgate. We thank Agnis Rečs for assistance during fieldwork and Kristaps Auziņš and Ieva Kalka for laboratory analyses. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on our manuscript.
Funding
Financial support was received from the University of Latvia within the “Climate change and sustainable use of natural resources” programme and by the specific support objective activity 1.1.1.2. “Post-doctoral Research Aid” (Project id. No.1.1.1.2/16/I/001) of the Republic of Latvia, funded by the European Regional Development Fund, PostDoc Kristaps Lamsters research project No.1.1.1.2/VIAA/1/16/118.
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. KL: conceived and designed research, collected the samples, described the geological setting, wrote the manuscript; JK, MK: designed research, collected the samples; MU, LB, IS, DF: performed the shotgun metagenome sequencing, bioinformatics and statistical analysis, wrote the manuscript; JG: tested the functional diversity of culturable microorganisms; RK – provided the chemical characterisation of samples; OM: tested the activity of culturable microorganisms, wrote the manuscript.
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Lamsters, K., Ustinova, M., Birzniece, L. et al. Bacterial and archaeal community structure in benthic sediments from glacial lakes at the Múlajökull Glacier, central Iceland. Polar Biol 43, 2085–2099 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00300-020-02770-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00300-020-02770-8