Metagenomes from Late Pleistocene Ice Complex Sediments of the Siberian Arctic.

Tatiana Vishnivetskaya,Elizaveta Rivkina,Maria Tutukina,Zhou Li,Xiaofen Wu,Lyubov Shmakova,Elena Spirina,Frank J Stewart

doi:10.1128/mra.01010-19

Abstract

The late Pleistocene Ice Complex (also known as Yedoma) encompasses ice-rich permafrost formed when alluvial and/or aeolian sediments accumulated under cold climatic conditions. Three metagenomes obtained from Yedoma deposits continually frozen for periods up to 60,000 years are reported here.

Highlights

The late Pleistocene Ice Complex contains massive polygonal ice wedges and segregated ice [1] that formed during syngenetic deposition when freezing and ground ice accumulation occurred simultaneously with sedimentation [2]
Based upon the taxonomic analysis on trimmed reads, Actinobacteria was the most abundant phylum in both the Bykovskiy Peninsula (BP) (22.4% of reads) and the Omolon River (OR) (36.3%) samples, whereas Proteobacteria dominated in the Gydanskiy Peninsula (GP) (17.7%) samples
Archaea were more abundant in the GP samples (3.4% of reads) than in the BP (0.5%) and the OR (1.6%) samples

Summary

Introduction

The late Pleistocene Ice Complex contains massive polygonal ice wedges and segregated ice [1] that formed during syngenetic deposition when freezing and ground ice accumulation occurred simultaneously with sedimentation [2]. The reads were compared to the NCBI nrϩeuk database in greedy mode (minimum match length, 15; minimum match score, 75; and allowed mismatches, 3) [12]. Trimmed reads were individually assembled using MEGAHIT v.1.0.3, with k-mer sizes of 41, 51, 61, 71, 81, and 91 [13].

Results

Conclusion