eukaryotic microbial communities in antarctic brines

In the last decades, some studies have described the ecology and diversity of psychrophilic and psychrotolerant microbiota inhabiting Antarctic ecosystems, which are regarded to be the coldest terrestrial habitats. Antarctic brines are unfrozen saline solutions entrapped within the permafrost: their genesis is due to the increasing salt concentration in groundwater around the permafrost combined to evaporation and halite dissolution processes that generates the formation of veins and pockets of salted liquid that remains unfrozen at subzero temperatures. Interestingly, this uncommon habitat has recently found on Mars by the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station on NASA's Curiosity.Two samples of brines were collected (in replicate) in 2015 from 4 and 5 meters of depth (B1 and B2) from Tarn Flat area (75°00’ S, 162°30’ E), north of the McMurdo Dry Valley, Victoria Land, Antarctica. Total DNA was extracted from both samples and fungal community was investigated targeting ITS regions via Illumina MiSeq system. Differences within fungal communities inhabiting both samples were analyzed using diversity indexes, Eulero-Venn and the linear discriminant analysis effect size (LEfSe) method. The yield of the Illumina run exhibited 245,503 reads formally classified as Fungi (yeast and filamentous fungi). The total number of OTUs was 588 of which only 60 (12.7%) were found in both sites. OTUs richness, Chao and Evenness resulted to be higher in B2 than in B1 (p value < 0.001).