Glacier ice archives nearly 15,000-year-old microbes and phages.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Glacier ice archives information, including microbiology, that helps reveal paleoclimate histories and predict future climate change. Though glacier-ice microbes are studied using culture or amplicon approaches, more challenging metagenomic approaches, which provide access to functional, genome-resolved information and viruses, are under-utilized, partly due to low biomass and potential contamination.

Results

We expand existing clean sampling procedures using controlled artificial ice-core experiments and adapted previously established low-biomass metagenomic approaches to study glacier-ice viruses. Controlled sampling experiments drastically reduced mock contaminants including bacteria, viruses, and free DNA to background levels. Amplicon sequencing from eight de

SUBMITTER: Zhong ZP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8290583 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature