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Recovery Of Nearly 3,000 Archaeal Genomes From 152 Terrestrial Geothermal Spring Metagenomes

By Keith Cowing
Status Report
Sci Data via PubMed
January 29, 2025
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Recovery Of Nearly 3,000 Archaeal Genomes From 152 Terrestrial Geothermal Spring Metagenomes
Archaeal composition across 152 Tengchong geothermal spring samples. (a) Relative abundance of Archaea within microbial communities. (b) Heatmap of the relative abundance of each archaeal class within archaeal communities. Samples are clustered by geothermal spring pools, and detailed information for each sample is provided in Supplementary Table 1. — Sci Data via PubMed

Terrestrial geothermal springs, reminiscent of early Earth conditions, host diverse and abundant populations of Archaea.

In this study, we reconstructed 2,949 metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) from 152 metagenomes collected over six years from 48 geothermal springs in Tengchong, China.

Among these MAGs, 1,431 (49%) were classified as high-quality, while 1,518 (51%) were considered as medium-quality. Phylogenomic analysis revealed that these MAGs spanned 12 phyla, 27 classes, 67 orders, 147 families, 265 genera, and 475 species.

Notably, 575 (19%) MAGs represented new taxa at various taxonomic levels, and 2,075 (70%) lacked nomenclature and effective descriptions. The most abundant phyla of archaeal genomes were Thermoproteota, Thermoplasmatota, and Micrarchaeota. The DRTY, ZMQ, and ZZQ geothermal springs were predominated by Archaea, particularly by Thermoproteia and Thermoplasmata.

These draft genomes provide new data for studying species diversity and function within terrestrial geothermal spring archaeal communities, thus contributing to the conservation and utilization of thermophilic and hyperthermophilic microbial resources.

Phylogeny of archaeal MAGs. (a) Phylogenetic tree displaying all strain-level archaeal MAGs (n = 603) at the order level. Lineages within the same phylum are displayed in the same color. Pie charts indicate potential novelty at the family- (blue), genus- (purple), and species-level (red) within the corresponding order. The colors, ranging from light to dark, indicate the proportion of MAGs that are newly identified, existing but without nomenclature, and existing with nomenclature, respectively. Green columns represent the number of archaeal MAGs within each order. (b) Distribution of all 2,949 archaeal MAGs at the phylum level. (c) Potential taxonomic novelty of archaeal MAGs at various taxonomic levels. Unnamed MAGs indicate those present in GTDB without nomenclature; New MAGs indicate those newly discovered in this study. (d) Genome size of MAGs across different archaeal phyla. (e) GC content of MAGs across different archaeal phyla. The letters indicate the grouping of results from the least significant difference (LSD) test for significance analysis of data across phyla. — Sci Data via PubMed

Recovery of nearly 3,000 archaeal genomes from 152 terrestrial geothermal spring metagenomes, Sci Data via PubMed (open access)

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