Subsurface metagenomics, functional microbial diversity analysis and gene discovery in deep and hot petroleum reservoirs

This project belongs to VISTA's previous research area Biotechnology

Deep petroleum reservoirs represent an extreme microbial environment shown to harbour a diversity of anaerobic and thermophilic bacteria and archaea from a variety of physiological groups. Knowledge about the main ecological functioning of these ecosystems in terms of life-sustaining biogeochemical processes is, however, still limited, and the vast majority of the organisms believed to be indigenous to deep petroleum formations have still not been cultivated and characterized.   

The main objectives of the current project are to obtain a better understanding of the diversity, genetics and physiology of these extremophilic microorganisms as well as to explore their possible biotechnological potential. The utilization of various electron donors and electron acceptors will be studied in combination with phylogenetic analyses using 16S rRNA gene sequences to link physiological properties to phylogenetic affiliations. The use of metagenomic approaches to investigate the genomic properties without prior culturing is also being applied, and selected isolates are being subjected to genome sequence analysis.