EAPSI: The Diversity and Distributions of Microbial Eukaryotes in Geothermal Environments

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Geothermal hotspring systems represent useful natural systems to assess microbial diversity and examine how environmental factors shape this diversity. Geothermal springs vary dramatically in their environmental characteristics and these gradients (e.g. temperature, pH) make hotsprings 'model' systems for understanding the ecological distributions of micro-eukaryotic communities. This project will investigate microbes in New Zealand hotspring ecosystems to characterize microbial eukaryotic communities. New Zealand is ideally suited for this work as it is home to thousands of unique hotspring ecosystems. This scientific bioinventory will be useful for scientists and policy makers to assess ecosystem uniqueness, biotechnology potential, and ecosystem health. This is particularly relevant given strong current interest in harnessing geothermal hotsprings for energy. This research will be conducted in collaboration with Dr. Craig Cary at the University of Waikato and Dr. Matthew Stott at GNS Science, experts in microbial ecology and hot spring ecosystems. Eukaryotic microbes (e.g. protists) are abundant and critical to ecosystem functioning, yet remain poorly characterized in hotsprings. This study will use archived samples from fifty geothermal hot springs collected from the Taupō Volcanic Zone (TVZ) in New Zealand that represent extreme gradients in temperature (13- 100.6°C), pH (0- 9.7) to search for novel eukaryotic diversity and test hypotheses on how environmental parameters shape microbial eukaryotic communities in geothermal environments. High-throughput DNA sequencing combined with microscopic analyses will be used to yield one of the first assessments of the microbial eukaryotic communities in geothermal environments. Although the bacteria and archaea found in hotsprings and other geothermal environments have been studied for decades, there are no comprehensive study of the microbial eukaryotic diversity found in these environments despite increasing evidence that they can be abundant and active. Thus, this project will contribute to our understanding of the biodiversity of hotspring systems and whether there are endemic eukaryotic microbial taxa found in these ecosystems. This award under the East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes program supports summer research by a U.S. graduate student and is jointly funded by NSF and the Royal Society of New Zealand.