Metagenomic profiling of Antarctic cRyptoendolithic communities preserved in the mycological Section on the Italian Antarctic National Museum, MNA

In the Antarctic ice-free areas of the Victoria Land, including the McMurdo Dry Valleys, the closest terrestrial analogue of Martian habitat, the endolithic microbial communities are the predominant life-form. These communities develop inside rock to find more buffered conditions compared to the surface, where the magnitude of external stresses is incompatible with epilithic life. Microorganisms in the communities, evolved over millions of years in almost complete isolation and under unmatched environmental pressure, are among the most resistant and adapted known to date. Besides, their specialization in exploiting these ultimate niches makes them very susceptible to physical and climatic deterioration; therefore, any changes in microbial communities may serve as early-alarm systems of environmental perturbation.

Along about 15 years of sampling in the frame of PNRA Antarctic campaigns, a huge number of colonised rocks have been collected and are now preserved in the Mycological Section of the Italian Antarctic National Museum (MNA, Genova), hosted at the University of Tuscia (Viterbo), representing a repository of inestimable scientific value to Polar science. Taking advantage of this repository, we proposed to use metagenomics, an innovative approach combining the power of genomics, bioinformatics, and systems biology, to get a complete information on microbial biodiversity and functionality of these communities and infer emergent properties, dynamics and interactions of microbes in their natural ecosystems. 

The massive information coming out from this project will be also utilized for generating an innovative, freely accessible database of Antarctic terrestrial assembled and annotated microbial genome sequences. This would represent an inestimable ecological tool to which all scientific researchers working on terrestrial Polar and extreme-environments might refer in future.