I spent the day at ECU at the QM Summit! It was a lot of fun! Tonight, I watched Nicole Wagner from Georgetown University present on “Evolutionary history of conical stromatolites.” This is the last video of the metagenomics playlist! Conical stromatolites can be used to study their formation and used to learn about microbial behaviors. The study site is in eastern Antarctica. Wagner explained that long reads can help exclude eDNA contamination from the community. For these samples trapped in a biofilm, Wagner used MetaPolyzyme for gentle lysis. First, Wagner did protease treatment followed by enzymatic digestion overnight. Phenol:chloroform extraction was used to purify the nucleic acids. Sequencing was performed on the MinION with the Ligation Sequencing Kit (LSK) and anlayzed with EPI2ME and ggplot2. Wagner compared conical stromatolites, that are rare and seem to only be found in this lake, to pinnacle mats. There was more diversity in the conical mats. Wagner normalized reads and learned that the abundances of dominant phyla are similar. Cyanobacteria were also similarly abundant in both samples. Wagner plans to do functional analysis and MAGs, as well as metatranscriptomic analysis and metaproteomic analysis. This work, Wagner explained, provides new information about microbial communities in ancient mats. It was useful to learn about the approach Wagner took, as it is similar to what Pushkar and I have been doing to learn about fungal communities.
