Microbial communities in continental smokers of northern Greece Targeted loci environmental

We propose the analysis of subsurface microbial and archeal communitiesfrom hydrothermal waters collected from geothermal exploration drillingsalong the northern part of Greece. All the drillings have been drilled atleast 10 years ago, are cased up to more than 100 m depth and haveartesian flow excluding interactions with shallow aquifers. The selectedsites cover a wide range of temperatures, salinities, and ionic and dissolved gascomposition. Their features are close to those of continental smokersrecently defined and characterized in the USA. The main goals of thisresearch are to describe the bacterial and archaeal communities ofEuropean black smokers, to investigate the role of physico-chemicalcharacteristics on the distribution of microbial taxa among thesegeothermal waters, to detect novel taxa and to compare life of continentalsmokers with submarine black smokers. Lead PI: Walter D' Alessandro, [e-mail]