EXPLORATION OF MICROBIAL DIVERSITY IN COASTAL SURFACE WATERS: A METAGENOMIC APPROACH. EXPLORATION OF MICROBIAL DIVERSITY IN COASTAL SURFACE WATERS: A METAGENOMIC APPROACH

Located in a tropical climate zone, the city of Belém, in Pará, has high temperatures with a good distribution of sunlight throughout the year, resulting in frequent searches for beach leisure areas, whether for water sports or diving. This demand tends to increase on weekends, holidays and especially in July, the month of school holidays. This demand tends to directly affect coastal ecosystems, since the presence of human beings always causes an imbalance in the microbiomes present in these areas, through the contamination of organic waste such as food scraps and inorganic waste such as plastic. In addition to contamination by waste left by visitors, the beaches in the Outeiro and Icoaraci districts suffer from the dumping of poorly treated sewage from the local population. The agency responsible for analyzing these areas and determining whether they are suitable or unsuitable for bathing is based on CONAMA resolution no. 274, which uses the density of E. coli, thermotolerants and enterococci as evaluation parameters, without taking into account other microorganisms that cause diseases or are potentially multiresistant. In view of this problem and the danger to public health, this project was developed with the objective of characterizing the microbiome of these ecosystems through taxonomic and functional profiling using metagenomics and bioinformatics, determining which of these are pathogenic and pose a risk to humans, identifying the presence of resistance genes using real-time PCR, analyzing how different levels of human contamination impact these microbiomes and the coastal ecosystem as a whole, relating to the periods of high and low demand.