Presenter: Scarlet Taveras Guzman

Faculty Sponsor: Brook Moyers

School: UMass Boston

Research Area: Biology

Session: Poster Session 3, 1:15 PM - 2:00 PM, Auditorium, A4

ABSTRACT

Salt marshes are essential habitats increasingly threatened by the accumulation of heavy metals from human activities. Heavy metal contamination greatly impacts ecosystems and poses a significant concern for human health. Microbial communities are affected by heavy metal contamination and vary genetically in their capacity to tolerate toxic metals. Understanding how soil microbial communities respond to contamination can provide insight on the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that shape composition and adaptation. To access this, we collected soil microbial communities from marshes in an urban setting (most contaminated) and a rural setting (least contaminated). We cultivated both microbial communities in treatments that mimicked the most and least heavy metal contaminated sites. We also cultured the communities in media containing varying metal contamination. We plan to access the changes in microbial communities through whole genome, 16S, and 18S genome sequencing. We hypothesize that soil microbes from the sites will show an ecological response, reflected by metal-tolerant taxa persisting in highly contaminated treatments, and less tolerant taxa persisting in low contamination. We will compare taxa across treatments from different sites. Next steps include observing local adaptation responses in soil microbial communities, assessing gene functions associated with metal tolerance that may be expressed in microbes from the most and less contaminated sites. Understanding how local adaptation and community composition aids in tolerance to heavy metals in salt marsh microbial communities will provide key insight into human impacts in these ecosystems.