Results
To investigate links between metabolic potential and genes associated with survival strategies across extreme temperature and geochemical gradients of the Deception Island volcano, we analyzed the metagenomes of a total of eighteen samples, comprising fumaroles with temperatures of 98 oC, 80 oC, 50oC, and 10 oC, and glaciers with temperatures around 0 oC. Shotgun sequencing of community genomic DNA on 3 lanes of Illumina HiSeq2000 produced a total of 567,410,264 paired-end reads, within which 475,895,996 were filtered by quality (Q>30) for further analyses. A total of 162,755,88 reads were taxonomically annotated as Bacteria, 3,680,020 as Archaea, 2,094,916 as Eukarya and 79,111 as viruses (Supplementary Table 2). The total number of proteins predicted in reads were 296,818,692 (62.3%). Relative abundances of the detected genes were used to compare the metabolic potential and genes related to survival strategies under environmental extremes among fumaroles and glaciers samples.
De novo assemblies of the quality-filtered reads generated a total of 543,945 contigs. The prediction of ORFs resulted in 1,396,820 putative genes, 353,731 assigned within Bacteria, 12,034 within Archaea, and 1,557 and 1,534 within Eukarya and viruses, respectively. We used different databases for assembly annotation through JGI/IMG that resulted in 487 putative 16S rRNA genes, 842,798 genes based on the COG database and 304,173 genes based on KEGG (Supplementary Table 2).