Microbial succession from ice to vegetated soils in response to glacial retreat

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When glaciers retreat, their forefields present a unique opportunity to investigate the initial phases of soil formation and microbial succession. As the ice retreats leaving space for microbial and plant colonisation, some studies show evidence of an increase in a variety of microbial proxies, such as nitrogen fixation, microbial enzymatic activity and diversity, in relation to years of exposure until certain soil stability is reached. Surprisingly, very little is known regarding the genetic and functional diversity of microbes in Arctic habitats. The composition and the metabolic potential of the entire microbial population can be explored by isolating and characterising their genetic material recovered directly from the environment using a metagenomic approach. Each sample of a soil habitat analysed represents a snapshot of the complex mixture of different microbial types and some types will be much more abundant than others. For instance, we predict in this project that genes associated with phototrophic C and N fixation and aerobic C metabolism will be predominant at the initial stages of succession in soil after glacial retreat, while deeper soil samples will provide conditions for anaerobic C and N metabolism to develop, include the production and consumption methane, which is a very powerful greenhouse gas. The metagenomic approach can be further linked to rates of metabolism and geochemical characteristics of soils, many of those factors have strong feedbacks with each other. There have been few integrated studies which link microbial diversity to ecosystem function and the biogeochemical cycling of key elements (C, N, Fe). This proposal aims to employ such integrated approach to generate new and uniquely datasets of genetic and functional diversity of representative terrestrial Arctic habitats. The project will instigate a step jump in our understanding of metabolic pathways of terrestrial Arctic habitats to improve biogeochemical models and quantification of the full metabolic package during successional events in soils after glacial retreat. The forefields of 2 glaciers (one in Svalbard and one in Greenland, which represent one small polar system and one major ice sheet, respectively) will be chosen for this project because they provide a range of forefield habitats of different sizes, locations, vegetation and availability of water surrounding the system. Samples for the metagenomic analyses will be taken from representative soils representing different ages of exposure after glacial retreat. We aim to generate several orders of magnitude more primary sequence data than existing metagenome pipelines were originally designed to deal with. This sampling strategy will give us a high-resolution picture of the microbial genetic and metabolic diversity associated with key elements (e.g., C, N, Fe) of glacial forefield habitats, also allowing us to PREDICT changes in metabolic pathways and biogeochemical cycles in response to glacial retreat. The project will instigate a step jump in our understanding of the biodiversity of glacial Arctic terrestrial habitats and provide a database that may be used to interpret data recovered during future. This will ultimately give us valuable insights in relation to the potential for life in other icy planets and moons and during the so called Snowball Earth. Data generated in this proposal can be incorporated into models of carbon, nitrogen, iron and sulphur cycling.