Seafloor sediment bacterial community profiling for a multi-year environmental baseline at a deep-sea oil production site offshore Nova Scotia, Canada

Monitoring effects of unintended environmental pollution is critical for preserving ecosystem health. However, this is challenging if baseline conditions are never established. Recently, the possibility of economically viable hydrocarbon reserves offshore Nova Scotia have been identified. Should this exploration lead to commercial discoveries and deep-water oil production in Canadian waters, questions need to be asked about the risk and preparedness in the event of an oil blowout. This region offers an opportunity of vital importance to establish ecosystem baselines before industrial activity accelerates. There is enormous potential for molecular methods to be incorporated as a highly sensitive and efficient approach for baselines. This study used molecular methods to establish the baseline seafloor microbial community of a potential offshore drilling site using selected samples from a collection of over 500 sediment samples obtained from 70 core stations along the Scotian Slope obtained during expeditions onboard CCGS Hudson in 2015 and 2016. The baseline amplicon libraries were made by PCR amplifying the 16S rRNA gene using the universal primers 341F/785R followed by sequencing on the Illumina MiSeq platform.