Comprehensive Analysis of Soil Bacterial Community Structure in King George Island, Maritime Antarctica

Abstract

In order to understand terrestrial ecosystem in Barton Peninsula, we have evolved a multidisciplinary project. There are six main components which sustain terrestrial ecosystem. As biotic factors, we considered microflora, flora and fauna, whereas climate, geomorphology and geochemistry can be considered as abiotic factors. Each component also has several sub-factors. For example, geomorphology has such altitude, aspect and slope. Components are related to each other. Climate can affect the composition of microbial flora, flora, fauna and geochemistry, while climate can be affected by geomophology. Over the last few decades, terrestrial environments in Antarctica had been believed as sterilized habitats without any life forms because of the extreme conditions. In recent years, expansions of molecular biological methods to study microbial communitieshave detected unexpectedly high diversity and complexity of bacteria community in this harsh environment. Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Gemmatimonadetesand Alphaproteobacteriawere dominant in McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctic continent (Lee, et al., 2011). Then, how about maritime Antarctica? Which bacterial phyla are dominant and how similar are bacterial community structures between soilhabitats in this region? We conducted a comprehensive analysis of bacterial communities in soil samples from Barton Peninsular in Antarctica. In total 258 soil samples from 51 sites were collected during the period from December 2010 to February 2012. Among these samples, we here present preliminary results with 85 samples in 15 sites.