Abstract
Subglacial lakes beneath the Vatnajökull ice cap in Iceland host endemic communities of microorganisms adapted to cold, dark and nutrient-poor waters, but the mechanisms by which these microbes disseminate under the ice and colonize these lakes are unknown. We present new data on this subglacial microbiome generated from samples of two subglacial lakes, a subglacial flood and a lake that was formerly subglacial but now partly exposed to the atmosphere. These data include parallel 16S rRNA gene amplicon libraries constructed using novel primers that span the v3–v5 and v4–v6 hypervariable regions. Archaea were not detected in either subglacial lake, and the communities are dominated by only five bacterial taxa. Our paired libraries are highly concordant for the most abundant taxa, but estimates of diversity (abundance-based coverage estimator) in the v4–v6 libraries are 3–8 times higher than in corresponding v3–v5 libraries. The dominant taxa are closely related to cultivated anaerobes and microaerobes, and may occupy unique metabolic niches in a chemoautolithotrophic ecosystem. The populations of the major taxa in the subglacial lakes are indistinguishable (>99% sequence identity), despite separation by 6 km and an ice divide; one taxon is ubiquitous in our Vatnajökull samples. We propose that the glacial bed is connected through an aquifer in the underlying permeable basalt, and these subglacial lakes are colonized from a deeper, subterranean microbiome.
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Acknowledgements
Support for the 2007 and 2009 sampling expeditions and sample analysis was provided by the Icelandic Center for Research (Contract No. 080222023), and, for the 2007 expedition, by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration through the NASA Astrobiology Institute under Cooperative Agreement NNA04CC08A issued through the Office of Space Science. The Icelandic National Energy Authority, National Power Company and Public Roads Administration provided logistical support. Members of the Icelandic Glaciological Society assisted in the fieldwork. NW was supported by a University of Hawaii NASA Space Grant Fellowship. The v3–v5 and v4–v6 pyrosequencing data were acquired by the Deep Carbon Observatory’s Deep Life sequencing team (Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, MA, USA), with funding by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation. We are grateful for the assistance of Mitch Sogin, Susan Huse, Andrew Voorhis and Sharon Grim at MBL.
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Thór Marteinsson, V., Rúnarsson, Á., Stefánsson, A. et al. Microbial communities in the subglacial waters of the Vatnajökull ice cap, Iceland. ISME J 7, 427–437 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2012.97
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