High quality MAGs from the Red Sea project

Brine pool environments are often assumed to support low diversity and biomass, recent work highlights the ability of deep-sea microbes to exploit reduced inorganic compounds such as hydrogen, nitrogen compounds, sulfide, or carbon monoxide to sustain life under energy-limited, anoxic conditions. However, how such adaptive strategies are employed in free-living (FL) and particle-attached (PA) microbial communities, and how they adapt to BP systems like the Atlantis II Deep compared to the adjacent ambient deep water (ADW) in the Red Sea, remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we investigated microbial communities from the Atlantis II Deep BP at a depth of 850 m, along with ADW (11.5 km away from the BP), to assess how contrasting physicochemical conditions shape microbial diversity, metabolic potential, and ecological partitioning between FL and PA communities. We analyzed key metabolic pathways associated with multiple physicochemical processes, including carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and sulfur cycling, and reconstructed metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) to resolve the taxonomic composition and functional capacity of key resident microbes.