Details

• Lecturer: Dr. Brandi Kiel Reese, Dept. of Life Sciences, Texas A&M University Corpus Christy (EUA)
• Date: Apr, 19, 2017 12:00 am
• Place: Sala d’Actes de l’Institut de Ciències de la Terra Jaume Almera (ICTJA)
• Further information: Dr. Josep Roqué Rosell

Abstract

The deep subsurface environment has been shown to host a diverse prokaryotic population that may be home to one of the largest biomes on Earth. This environment has only recently been appreciated as a diverse metabolically active ecosystem, profoundly affecting global elemental cycles. Due to extreme difficulty inherent in sampling this environment, relatively few locations have been studied in depth and over time. Therefore, the diversity, abundance, energy metabolisms and active fraction of subsurface organisms have traditionally been poorly constrained. My research uses high throughput sequencing to comprehensively survey archaeal and bacterial communities in deeply buried continental and marine environments. Unlike other environments, the deep subsurface provides a unique opportunity to study biogeography across four dimensions. These samples are not only isolated by linear space on a global scale, but they are also temporally isolated by, in some cases, tens of millions of years.