TRACKING GLOBAL CHANGES IN ANTARCTIC CYANOBACTERIA BIODIVERSITY

With increasing concern regarding global climate change, evaluation of biodiversity (genetic, species, ecosystem), is necessary in order to track changes within the climate system: it affects interpretations of future global and especially polar climate change. In this context, Cyanobacteria diversity monitoring could be important as a possible biological indicator. Our hypotheses regard diversity and connectivity between diverse habitats across a range of geographic scales. Cyanobacteria have a cosmopolitan distribution in many extreme environments and they adapt to various stress environments, thus playing important roles in carbon and nitrogen cycles modifying morphology, metabolism and light-harvesting systems. By studying antarctic Cyanobacteria biodiversity, its adaptation and distribution at different spatial scales, we aimed at determining whether polar soil ecosystems could be more sensitive to anthropogenic climate change than temperate regions. Cyanobacteria were collected from several sub-regions of the Antarctica and genetically analyzed by 16S-ITS-23S and TrnL sequencing. Moreover, a data set of gene bank was included for phylogenetic analyses and different habitat was compared between them: Antarctic soil, Mediterranean Sea and lakes. By molecular markers Cyanobacteria species were identificated and their phylogenetic analyses was related to their ecotypes characterization (different substrate and geographical coordinates). Results show their affinity of the aplotypes examined by Genbank sequence and their reciprocal relations in that region 16S (partial) and ITS (included trnIle and trnAla). Our results lead to support an independent phylogenetic dataset of ITS and TrnL producing concordant clusters.