It is well known that microorganisms can have positive or negative interactions with each other in the natural environment. Our research area is about the relationship between microorganisms with the environment. Specifically, we investigated how Antarctic microorganisms living in ice-covered lakes are affected by nutrient limitation. We used the enrichment cultures collected from an ice-covered, nutrient deficient lake (Lake Bonney) located in the Antarctic McMurdo Dry Valleys. Cultures were grown in L1 medium with either 100% nutrient levels (controls) or 10% nitrogen and phosphorous levels. OD 600, Fv/Fm measurements, and countess measurements to compare with the original data T0. Finally, we did the18S and 16S rRNA sequencing to identify organisms in culture and the diversity of the culture. According to the data, we found that the diversity of microorganisms and the number of microorganisms in the nutrient deficiency environment was less than the T0 group which means microorganisms did not have good living states in the low-nutrient environment. For the 18S rRNA sequencing showed that low-nutrient environment caused a loss in diversity of the eukaryotes. Researchers need to think about the different pressures of the environment that can change the growth states of microorganisms which is a good indicator of human understanding different microorganisms can live in different environments. In the future, those relationships can give researchers a hint about the natural evolutionary process.
Authors: Steve Yu and Yinan Qiu, Microbiology
Faculty Advisor: Rachael Morgan-Kiss, Microbiology
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