Analysis of a soil metagenome from the Argentine Northwest Monte and Thistle of the Prepuna region of the Province of Salta.

JORGELINA MOREIRAS CLEMENTE; CHRISTINA B. MCCARTHY

CABA

Conferencia; 4th ISCB Latin America Conference (ISCB-LA) and 7th Argentine Congress of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (CAB2C); 2016

International Society for Computational Biology Latin America y Asociación Argentina de Bioinformática y Biología Computacional

Background:Even though soil microbiota produce many of the most important pharmaceutical drugs, the traditional approach for characterising the biosynthetic capacity of environmental microorganisms has provided very limited access to this potential. Recent analyses of soil microbiomes have revealed a vastly unexplored biosynthetic diversity and, in general, arid soils have shown the richest biosynthetic diversity. In this study we characterised a soil metagenome from an arid pristine environment using a metagenomic shotgun approach. For this, a sample was collected from the Argentine Northwest Monte and Thistle of the Prepuna region (Cafayate Department, Salta; S26°01.123´ W65°49.429´). Results:DNA was extracted and submitted to high-throughput pyrosequencing. Sequence reads were trimmed and assembled. Homology searches were performed against the non-redundant nucleotide and protein sequence NCBI databases, and the taxonomic and functional contents were analysed with MEGAN. The metagenome consisted of bacteria, archaea, eukaryota and viruses. Approximately 73% of the contigs showed homology to bacteria, mainly Phyla Actinobacteria, Proteobacteria and Acidobacteria. The functional analysis indicated that the majority of the contigs was associated with carbohydrate and protein metabolism, and in lesser proportion with the metabolism of nitrogen, sulfur and aromatic compounds, among others.Conclusions:These results provide information on the potential effects of this ecosystem type on the composition, diversity and biosynthetic potential of the soil metagenome. Furthermore, the metagenome was associated with the catabolism of many major soil contaminants. This is of particular importance in the area of La Plata, where one of the most important oil refineries in the country is found.