aesacco
commented
7 years ago @utn100 @samendrasherchan Perhaps this would go well with issue 24
Open zenrabbit opened 7 years ago
aesacco
commented
7 years ago @utn100 @samendrasherchan Perhaps this would go well with issue 24
Author: UYEN NGUYEN Topic: microbial community analysis
Topic
Indigenous microbial communities is one important factor among many (e.g., temperature, pressure, and background organic matter) that control crude oil biodegradation. One question we ask in our current biodegradation research is how well-equipped the microbial communities in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) are in response to oil spill events, particularly in deep waters. Under laboratory optimal conditions, microbial communities in our study were prompt to degrade crude oil, even at 15Mpa. Oil-degraders have been evolved for millions of years and are relatively ubiquitous in marine environments, the GOM water, in particular has been exposed to natural seeps and human oil spills. Here, we propose to map the presence and abundance of known hydrocarbon degraders and genes associated with hydrocarbon degradation across the GOM horizontally and vertically, by synthesizing publicly available database (e.g., JGI, NCBI, etc.) of previous microbial community studies. To add one more level of complexity, hydrocarbon degraders can be sorted based on their capabilities to degrade certain compound groups (e.g., n-alkanes vs. polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons).
Goals
The goals of this project include: 1. to search for public resources of microbial community studies (e.g., 16s-RNA and metagenomes) and to download these data; 2. to create databases of known oil-degraders/genes and apply them to filter a large data set; and 3. to visualize the distribution and abundance of major hydrocarbon degraders/genes in GOM waters and sediments. Biodegradation is a crucial mechanism to deplete oil, especially in deep water environments where other weathering processes (e.g., photo-oxidation and evaporation) are not relevant. The results of this project will potentially help us evaluate the competency of GOM microbial communities in degrading oil that has implication in bioremediation decision making.