The seminar is organized by the Institute for Biological Systems of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR-ISB). The event takes place at the CNR Area territoriale di Ricerca, Montelibretti (Rome), conference room, building n. 6.
Event date: 13 february 2025, 11.30 – 12.30 am
Seminar speaker: Dr. Anne D. Jungblut, Natural History Museum of London, UK.
The presentation provides an overview of how microbiome research in polar microbiology, geomicrobiology and agriculture helps addressing key research themes including Biodiversity Change and Resourcing the Green Economy at the Natural History Museum, London, UK.
Omics technologies are offering exciting approaches to gain more in-depth insights into microbial diversity, ecology and adaptations across space and time, and disentangle drivers of taxa distribution and community assemblies. A research topic of great interest is the impact of mining on the environment in particular to the increasing demand for metals to support the energy transition and reaching net zero to reduce carbon emissions and limit climate change.
We applied environmental metabarcoding in an abundant mine in the Philippines and showed the long term effects of copper on soils and water that are now used for farming by the local communities, highlighting the need for holistic approaches in mine rehabilitation. Of particular interest are also the Polar Regions where climatic change is expected to alter the hydrology, geochemistry and stability of freshwater environments.
We have documented diverse and rich prokaryote, protist and fungi communities across different habitats using long and short read sequencing as well as shown a decrease in microbial mats in terrestrial aquatic environments from the sub to high arctic linked to environmental conditions, highlighting sensitivity of microbial eukaryotes to environmental gradients across the Arctic. Cyanobacteria are widely distributed and are important for these polar environments and therefore studying the genomic traits and photoprotective mechanisms that may place a role for survival in the cold terrestrial biosphere, as well as unlock historic herbarium collection including the Captain Scott’ Discovery Expedition to gain a better understanding of the impact of climate change on polar biodiversity and ecology.
Speaker bio: Dr Anne Jungblut is a Principal Researcher at the Natural History Museum and National Geographic Explorer. Her Microbes research group at the NHM studies microbial diversity and ecology and adaptation mechanisms of microbial communities that are able to thrive under extreme conditions of freshwater environments in the Polar Regions and gain better understand of the potential effect of climatic-driven environmental change. Other research foci are microbiome research into microbe-plant and microbe-mineral interactions for sustainable agriculture and mine site rehabilitation. Her research group uses a combination of DNA sequencing approaches, microscopy, laboratory experimentation and museum herbarium collections of cyanobacteria. Dr Anne D. Jungblut has a keen interest in community science and was the lead scientists on the NHM citizen science project The Microverse. She has published over 50 peer-reviewed publications and 6 book chapters as well as participated in over 15 expeditions to the Polar Regions.
