The role of viruses in saline Antarctic lakes

Metadata record for data from ASAC Project 2306
See the link below for public details on this project.
---- Public Summary from Project ----
In the last ten years aquatic microbial ecologists have come to appreciate the potential importance of viruses in microbial community dynamics. Bacteria, algae and protists are all infected by viruses and suffer lysis. This impacts on the cycling of carbon and essential inorganic nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) in marine and freshwater ecosystems. In order to produce accurate models of these biogeochemical processes, we must gain a full understanding of the nature, abundances, infectivity and turnover rates of viruses in aquatic ecosystems. There is clear evidence that viruses may also maintain clone diversity of microbial elements in the plankton directly by gene transmission or transduction, and indirectly by eliminating dominant host species. Moreover, they also appear to be grazed, along with bacteria, by heterotrophic nanoflagellates. Thus the role of viruses is multifarious and there is a growing realisation that these tiny particles, which can reach abundances of 108 ml-1 in aquatic ecosystems, may play a major role in mediating community dynamics and geochemical processes. We propose investigating the role of viruses marine microbial communities, by using natural, simplified model ecosystems. They are dominated by a microbial plankton, there are no fish and few or no zooplankton. The saline lakes are marine derived systems retaining elements of the marine microbial plankton, and are consequently analogues of the marine environment.In addition to more easily clarify the role of viruses in biogeochemical cycling we will incorporate a study of cryconite holes.

The dataset is stored as an excel spreadsheet, and divided into 3 sheets - one for each lake studied: Ace Lake, Pendant Lake, Highway Lake. A text document detailing the methods used in the study is also available for download.

The fields in this dataset are:

Location
Date
Sampling depth
snowcover
snow depth
ice depth
PAR
temperature
conductivity
pH
NO3
PO
NH4
Total Oxygen Content
Dissolved Oxygen Content
Chlorophyll
Virus
Heterotrophic bacteria
Phototrophic bacteria
Pyramimonas
Cryptophytes
Chlamydomonas Type 2
HNAN
Cryptophyte Type 1
Bacteria
PPR
Leucine BPR
Thymidine BPR