Interannual study of microbial diversity in Antarctic lakes

Antarctic lakes serve as sentinels of environmental change, hosting microbial communities essential for ecosystem functioning. This makes them ideal systems for studying the temporal and spatial dynamics of microbial communities. However, the relative magnitude of temporal and spatial variation in these ecosystems remains poorly understood. In this study, we investigated the spatial and temporal variation of bacterial community structure and underlying assembly processes across sediment and water compartments in 11 lakes on the Fildes Peninsula, King George Island (South Shetland Islands), Maritime Antarctica, sampled during austral summers from 2017 to 2023. The prokaryotic communities were analyzed by amplicon sequencing of 16S rRNA gene.