Microbial Diversity in Moonmilk of Baeg-nyong Cave, Korean CZO.

ABSTRACT: The Baeg-nyong cave is a limestone cave which has been nominated as the first critical zone observatory (CZO) in South Korea. Moonmilk is a well-known speleothem composed of various carbonate minerals. To characterize moonmilk from the Baeg-nyong cave, we performed mineralogical analyses and applied high-throughput 16S rRNA gene sequencing to analyze the microbial communities, including bacteria and fungi, of dry and wet moonmilk samples. The results showed that the dry and wet moonmilk samples had different and atypical crystal structures, although they were predominantly composed of CaCO₃. Furthermore, metagenomic data revealed that the dry and wet moonmilk samples collected from an oligotrophic environment had completely different bacterial communities when compared to the ou

SUBMITTER: Park S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7190796 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature