Microbial Diversity in Deep-Subsurface Hot Brines of Northwest Poland: from Community Structure to Isolate Characteristics

• Agnieszka Kalwasińska ^[1] ; Arkadiusz Krawiec ^[1] ; Edyta Deja-Sikora ^[1] ; Marcin Gołębiewski ^[1] ; Przemysław Kosobucki ^[2] ; Maria Swiontek Brzezinska ^[1] ; Maciej Walczak ^[1]
  1. [1] Nicolaus Copernicus University

     Nicolaus Copernicus University

     Toruń, Polonia

     
  2. [2] f Department of Food Analysis and Environmental Protection, UTP University of Science and Technology, Bydgoszcz, Poland
• Localización: Applied and Environmental Microbiology, ISSN 0099-2240, Vol. 86, Nº 10, 2020
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Deep-subsurface aquifers, buried thousands of meters down the Earth’s crust, belong to the most underexplored microbial habitats. Although a few studies revealed the existence of microbial life at the depths, the knowledge about the microbial life in the deep hydrosphere is still scarce due to the limited access to such environments. Studying the subsurface microbiome provides unique information on microbial diversity, community structure, and geomicrobiological processes occurring under extreme conditions of the deep subsurface. Our study shows that low-diversity microbial assemblages in subsurface hot brines were dominated by the bacteria involved in biogeochemical cycles of sulfur and nitrogen. Based on genomic and physiological analyses, we found that the Bacillus paralicheniformis isolate obtained from the brine under study differed from the mesophilic species in the presence of specific adaptations to harsh environmental conditions. We indicate that some lineages of B. paralicheniformis are halothermophilic, which was not previously reported.