Department of Ocean Science - Postgraduate Student Seminar: Offshore microbial interactions and microbe-driven hydrocarbon metabolism

Abstract:

Due to geographic specificity and complexity, Estuarine wetland environments occupy a pivotal position in environmental science research. Estuarine wetland ecosystems have become a relatively complex part of the carbon sink issue. Hydrocarbon compounds, as a part of the carbon cycle that occupies an important component, are both polluting and resourceful. This makes the means of dealing with hydrocarbon compounds in nature important and diverse. Cyanobacteria are widely distributed in the oceans, and as high flux and high metabolism organisms. However, there is a lack of specific knowledge about the rhythms of biofuel production by cyanobacteria in the studies of cyanobacteria. There is also a lack of knowledge about how cyanobacteria participate in the carbon cycle as a link in hydrocarbon production in nature. We attempted to identify the key factors affecting the efficiency of hydrocarbon cycling and the involvement of various microorganisms in the estuarine microbial community through metagenomic analysis. We compared the sequences of wild-caught microbial samples with a constructed carbon database. The expression abundance of various genes and the reaction mechanisms involved were further analyzed by combining the physicochemical data obtained. Through this route, we tried to find the key genes that are affected by estuarine ecology in the process of alkane production by cyanobacteria. We simulated the model strain Prochlorococcus MED4. We followed the alkane production of MED4 during its growth by simulating diurnal variations and detected that the main hydrocarbon produced by MED4 was the long-chain hydrocarbon pentadecane, and that it actively released the products to the outside world during the process of alkane production. The interference of phage P-HM2 exacerbated this phenomenon. 

All Are Welcome!