Meeting Abstract
55.2 Saturday, Jan. 5 Marine Eukaryotic Diversity in Sediments Along a Shallow Water Hydrothermal Gradient Inferred from 18S rDNA. KARLEN, D.J.*; WU, T.; CAMPBELL, T.G.; GAREY, J.R.; Univ. of South Florida; Univ. of South Florida; Univ. of South Florida; Univ. of South Florida karlen@epchc.org
Marine eukaryotic diversity was characterized along an environmental gradient related to a shallow water hydrothermal vent at Tutum Bay, Ambitle Island, Papua New Guinea. The eukaryotic community was characterized by extracting DNA from sediment samples and sequencing a portion of the 18S rDNA region. Samples were collected at nine sites along a transect running from the vent at 30-50m intervals and an additional reference site located approximately 1.5 km from the vent.. At each site, five replicate sediment core samples (3 cm diameter, 5 cm depth) were taken randomly. Additional sediment and pore water samples were collected for corresponding physiochemical analysis. The replicate core samples from each site were pooled and sieved through a 500 mesh screen onto a 53�m mesh sieve and stored frozen. DNA was extracted using commercially available soil DNA extraction kits (UltraCleanTM Soil DNA Kit, MO BIO Laboratories, Inc.) and the 18S rDNA was amplified by PCR, cloned and sequenced. The sequences were trimmed to a final 550 bp fragment. Sequencher 4.7TM software was used to assemble operational taxonomic units (OTUs) based on a 99% match. Individual OTUs were provisionally identified using the BLAST search function in Genbank. OTUs were used as a proxy for �species� and the proportion of each unique sequence of the site total served as a proxy for �abundance�. Traditional diversity indices and multivariate analysis was done using PRIMER v6. Initial results indicate that metazoans consistently comprised nearly half of the eukaryote sequences, with fungal sequences also making up a large proportion at all sites.
