麥基爾大學台灣研究生同學會

The Arctic is a very harsh environment where living things, such as plants, animals and microorganisms, cannot grow and survive easily with low temperatures, low water activity, low nutrition, high radiation exposure, and high salt concentration. Although the Arctic is not a suitable environment for living things, microorganisms can still be found in several ecosystems, such as permafrost, ice wedges, glaciers, ice shelves, cryonite holes, and subglacier lakes, etc., in the Arctic area with their own specificity. How diverse the microbial composition in those ecosystems can be is still an interesting issue because people are not acquainted with those extreme environments.
My study focuses on the microbial diversity in the Arctic. The sampling site, Lost Hammer Spring located in the Canadian High Arctic, Axel Heiberg Island, is a unique, unfrozen, highly saline, and perennial spring with gas bubbling with rich methane. Currently, I am working on the metagenomic and metatranscriptomic study of the sediments from the source of the spring and its channel. Furthermore, from the sediments of the outflow channels, I have already completed 16S rRNA clone libraries of bacteria and archaea for realizing the bacterial and archaeal composition in the channel sediment. So far, several interesting phylotypes, such as methanogenic, methylotrophic, and Thaumarchaeota-like microorganisms, have been found in the clone libraries. As well some representatives of bacteria have been cultured in relatively high concentration of NaCl under subzero temperatures. Some of the representatives can even survive and grow with relatively high concentrations of perchlorate, which is a highly hazardous salt for most microorganisms. This research implies the relationship between the microorganisms inhabiting in such extreme environment and the geochemical features. Furthermore, the results of the research can also be applied to the research of astrobiology due to the analogous features of the sampling site compared with the extraterrestrial bodies, such as Mars, Europa, or Encaladus.



Here is a video about the research of our lab. Please click here and then go to the video of "Searching for arctic microbes"