Eastern Oyster Microbiome Metagenome

On 20 April 2010, the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) blowout released an estimated 780,000 m3 of crude oil into the northern Gulf of Mexico (GOM) over an 85-day period. Consequently, up to 80,000 square miles along the impacted area were closed to fishing, resulting in loss of food, jobs, and recreation. Specifically, in the northern GOM, oyster reefs and productive oyster harvesting areas were likely exposed for several weeks to oil from the DWH oil plume. Because of their filter feeding behavior, oysters are especially susceptible to pollutants present in the overlaying water. As a corollary, oysters may concentrate oil-degrading bacteria from the overlaying waters. In fact, several studies have shown that the oyster microbiome consists of a diverse collection of bacteria that not only differ taxonomically from the surrounding seawater but also outnumber the water bacterial populations by several orders of magnitude, likely due to the oyster’s filter feeding processes. This study examines the potential microbiome of the Eastern oyster and from the overlaying water column and the oyster bed sediments. For this purpose, samples were collected and bacterial metagenome was constructed from oyster tissue (OT), mantle fluid (MF), overlaying water column, and sediments (S) collected from Apalachicola Bay, FL, USA. This represents the first comprehensive report on the largely understudied Eastern Oyster microbiome.