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Microbial Ecology of the Red Sea
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The Red Sea provides the opportunity to investigate marine prokaryotes in a very unique setting. High average temperatures year around, only limited water mixing with the Indian Ocean, nearly no freshwater import from streams and rivers (thus no import of organic and inorganic nutrients), and constant high solar radiation are some of the factors that rendered the Red Sea highly saline and nutrient-poor.
In my laboratory, we are interested in how Bacteria and Archaea adapted to these conditions. By combining novel culturing techniques and molecular methods to investigate non-culturable bacteria (flow cytometry and single-cell genomics, metagenomics, metatranscriptomics), we want to analyze structure and function of different groups of marine prokaryotes.
A short term goals, we want analyze the community composition in surface waters of the Red Sea and isolate the most abundant oligotrophic hetererotrophic bacteria and phototrophic prochlorophytes in order to compare their morphology, metabolism, and genomes to members of the same species from other oceans.
We are also interested in extremophiles in the Deep Brines pools in the Red Sea. The Red Sea is an ocean in statu nascendi, where transition from continental to oceanic rift is currently occurring. The emplacement of new oceanic crust together with leaching from sub-bottom Miocene evaporites resulted in the formation of at least 25 isolated brine-filled deeps, usually highly enriched in heavy metal and displaying increased water temperature. All of these deep-sea, anoxic, brine pools form characteristic steep gradients along the brine-seawater interface (e.g. salinity, temperature density, O2, pH).
The long term goals include the establishment of a microbial observatory to analyze changes in community structure over time and depths. We also want to establish a Red Sea microbial culture collection at KAUST for researchers in Saudi Arabia, the region, and the world.
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