Inter- and Intra-Annual Bacterioplankton Community Patterns in a Deepwater Sub-Arctic Region: Persistent High Background Abundance of Putative Oil Degraders.

ABSTRACT: Hydrocarbon-degrading bacteria naturally degrade and remove petroleum pollutants, yet baselines do not currently exist for these critical microorganisms in many regions where the oil and gas industry is active. Furthermore, understanding how a baseline community changes across the seasons and its potential to respond to an oil spill event are prerequisites for predicting their response to elevated hydrocarbon exposures. In this study, 16S rRNA gene-based profiling was used to assess the spatiotemporal variability of baseline bacterioplankton community composition in the Faroe-Shetland Channel (FSC), a deepwater sub-Arctic region where the oil and gas industry has been active for the last 40 years. Over a period of 2 years, we captured the diversity of the bacterioplankton community within

SUBMITTER: Angelova AG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8092327 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature