Metagenomic analysis of microbial community of an Amazonian geothermal spring in Peru

Abstract

Aguas Calientes (AC) is an isolated geothermal spring located deep into the Amazon rainforest (7°21′12″ S, 75°00′54″ W) of Peru. This geothermal spring is slightly acidic (pH 5.0–7.0) in nature, with temperatures varying from 45 to 90 °C and continually fed by plant litter, resulting in a relatively high degree of total organic content (TOC). Pooled water sample was analyzed at 16S rRNA V3–V4 hypervariable region by amplicon metagenome sequencing on Illumina HiSeq platform. A total of 2,976,534 paired ends reads were generated which were assigned into 5434 numbers of OTUs. All the resulting 16S rRNA fragments were then classified into 58 bacterial phyla and 2 archaeal phyla. Proteobacteria (88.06%) was found to be the highest represented phyla followed by Thermi (6.43%), Firmicutes (3.41%) and Aquificae (1.10%), respectively. Crenarchaeota and Euryarchaeota were the only 2 archaeal phyla detected in this study with low abundance. Metagenomic sequences were deposited to SRA database which is available at NCBI with accession number SRX1809286. Functional categorization of the assigned OTUs was performed using PICRUSt tool. In COG analysis “Amino acid transport and metabolism” (8.5%) was found to be the highest represented category whereas among predicted KEGG pathways “Metabolism” (50.6%) was the most abundant. This is the first report of a high resolution microbial phylogenetic profile of an Amazonian hot spring.

Activated sludge bacterial communities of typical wastewater treatment plants: distinct genera identification and metabolic potential differential analysis

“…The sludge samples from Shangyu WWTP mainly consisted of Acidobacteria, Proteobacteria, Candidatus phylum SBR1093, Chloroflexi and Thermi . Thermi has been found in geothermal springs all over the world and is known to be involved in NH 4 + –N removal (Coman et al 2015 ; Liang et al 2016 ; Panda et al 2016 ; Paul et al 2016 ). Due to the fact that industrial wastewater is usually discharged with an amount of heat, the influent temperature could hit 40 °C in summer.…”

The Microbial Composition in Circumneutral Thermal Springs from Chignahuapan, Puebla, Mexico Reveals the Presence of Particular Sulfur-Oxidizing Bacterial and Viral Communities

“…The most studied thermophilic environment in the world is Yellowstone National Park (YNP) (pH 2, 75 • C) [1,5], where pioneering studies opened the possibility of exploring the diversity of microorganisms in extreme environments, as well as the genes that encode enzymes with biotechnological applications [3,[6][7][8]. Recently, a growing interest in studying these ecosystems has emerged [1,[9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22], and these studies have focused on the sites of high temperatures and acidic or alkaline pH [15,16,19,[23][24][25], and have identified a high diversity of microorganisms [22,26]. Intermediate or circumneutral hot springs also exhibit a high diversity of microorganisms; biodiversity generally decreases with increasing temperature and decreasing pH [21].…”

Exploring the taxonomical and functional profile of As Burgas hot spring focusing on thermostable β-galactosidases

“…Temperature has been reported as a key factor in the prevalence of Proteobacteria. Dominance of this phylum has been found in geographically distant but moderate-temperature (29–65 °C) geothermal springs like Deulajhari and Tattapani in India 25 , 26 , Aguas Calientes in the Amazon rainforest of Perú 27 , Chiraleu, Ciocaia, and Mihai Bravu in Romania 28 or El Coquito in the Colombian Andes 29 . Moreover, Power et al 30 found that the phyla Proteobacteria and Aquificae dominated in 925 geothermal springs in New Zealand (65.2% total average relative abundance across all springs), especially in hot springs with temperatures below 50 °C where Proteobacteria were the most abundant phylum.…”