Incidence of phosphate concentration over the abundance of arsenic genes in the Andean Microbial Ecosystems

SAONA, LUIS ALBERTO; SORIA, MARIANA NOELIA; STEPANENKO, TATIANA MARIEL; LENCINA, AGUSTINA INÉS; CONTRERAS, MANUEL; FARÍAS, MARÍA EUGENIA

Ischia

Congreso; 12th International Congress of Extremophiles_Italy 2018; 2018

National Research Council of Italy, University of Naples "Federico II", ISE Extremophiles

Phosphate and arsenate are very similar compounds, and there is great interest in studying their relationship and their interaction with biological systems. Despite having no apparent biological function, specific genes regulate arsenic interaction with cells and can be located in regions of the genome called arsenic islands, where phosphate metabolism genes are also present. Although they are neighboring genes, the nature of their relationship and how they have been selected is unknown. In this sense, we wanted to evaluate how the phosphate concentration affects the presence and abundance of arsenic metabolism genes. In this work we have evaluated the presence and abundance of both arsenic and phosphate metabolism genes through the metagenomes of four microbial ecosystems. The samples were taken from hypersaline lakes of the Argentine Puna and the Atacama salt flat in Chile, which include microbialites, biofilms and microbial mats, all of them established under high arsenic concentration.