Antarctica is the highest, driest, and coldest continent on Earth. Its characteristics make it inhospitable to most multicellular life forms, however, microbes are present in every niche, from underwater lakes to the roots of the two native vascular plants in Antarctica, Deschampsia antarctica and Colobanthus quitensis. In this area of research, we are currently working on two interrelated projects.
Origin of Antarctic rhizosphere. In the first project, we want to understand what’s the origin of the rhizosphere of these two plant species, what are the genetic functions they encode, and whether they provide any services to the plants. For this, we use an ASPA site, Byers Peninsula, located at the Western tip of Livingston Island (South Shetlands), Antarctica, as a model. Here, we have taken samples from four sites that encompass a variety of conditions such as both plants occurring together or alone, nearby the coast, close to a glacier, etc. We are using amplicon and shotgun sequencing to characterize the composition and structure of these communities, as well as temporal stability. We are also focusing our efforts on isolating the most abundant microbes of the rhizosphere to create synthetic communities in the lab and test hypothesis in an experimental setting.