Microbiomes of Arctic glacier foreland ecosystems and their metabolic potentials

Land-terminating glaciers are retreating globally, resulting in the expansion of the ice-free glacier forelands (GFs). These GFs act as a natural laboratory to study microbial community succession, soil formation, and ecosystem development. However, not much effort has been made to reconstruct metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) and to investigate their metabolic functions in the Arctic GFs. In the present study, we have used both gene-centric and genome-resolved metagenomic approaches to disseminate, microbial diversity, community structure, and their associated metabolic processes involved in the carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur cycling across three distinct GF ecosystems. The abundance of metabolic genes associated with carbon, nitrogen and sulfur cycling pathways were found to vary between and within the samples collected across the three GFs ecosystems. Our results suggest that MAGs from the distinct GFs were phylogenetically closely related; however, their abundance, distribution patterns, and metabolic potentials were significantly different.