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Biodiversity and Biogeography of Bacteria in Polar and Alpine Environments
Tatiana A. Vishnivetskaya, David A. Gilichinsky
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee, USA, [email protected]
By definition, biogeography studies the past and present distribution of the world's many species
and examines how physical environment affects and shapes species and their distribution. To
date is little known about the bacterial species distribution across the space and time. The current
presentation aims to review the phylogenetic diversity, abundance and distribution of selected
bacterial genera across the polar and alpine environments using available genomics and
metagenomics data.
There are a number of bacterial genera which have been repeatedly detected in and isolated from
different environments. For example Exiguobacterium has been isolated from cold and temperate
soils and from marine and hot spring waters; Psychrobacter has been isolated from cold and
temperate soils as well as from marine environments; Paenibacillus has been isolated from cold,
temperate, and thermal habitats including terrestrial, aquatic, and host-associated. Other bacteria
such as Desulfovibrio have been isolated from permafrost and other terrestrial and aquatic
uncontaminated and pollutant-contaminated sites. How genomes of the same genus bacteria
change in respond to varying environmental characteristics? What genes would be essential to
psychrophilic life style? The inhabitants of terrestrial environments may have evolved unique
adaptations related to heterogenous environmental chemistry, but marine bacteria may likely
reflect adaptations to stable low temperatures, high solute concentrations, and homogenous
environmental chemistry.
The availability of genome sequences will facilitate a comprehensive characterization of features
that responsible for growth, metabolism, other organisms’ properties, and initiate an analysis of
questions related to biogeography.
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