Biodiversity hot spot on a hot spot: novel extremophile diversity in Hawaiian fumaroles.

ABSTRACT: Fumaroles (steam vents) are the most common, yet least understood, microbial habitat in terrestrial geothermal settings. Long believed too extreme for life, recent advances in sample collection and DNA extraction methods have found that fumarole deposits and subsurface waters harbor a considerable diversity of viable microbes. In this study, we applied culture-independent molecular methods to explore fumarole deposit microbial assemblages in 15 different fumaroles in four geographic locations on the Big Island of Hawai'i. Just over half of the vents yielded sufficient high-quality DNA for the construction of 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequence clone libraries. The bacterial clone libraries contained sequences belonging to 11 recognized bacterial divisions and seven other division-level phyloge

SUBMITTER: Wall K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4398508 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature