As part of his PhD project Nathan has been using phylogenetic methods to better understand how many different lineages of cyanbobacteria are adapted to survival in cold enviroments, research that is published here in Frontiers in Microbiology.
By constructing a large dataset of SSU rRNA genes from across the whole diversity of cyanobacteria and performing Bayesian Ancestral State Reconstruction, we showed that cyanobacteria have colonised the cryosphere in at least 20 independent lineages.
Figure 1. Ancestral state reconstruction of past habitat preference in cyanobacteria found in the cryosphere. Sequences were assigned a binary character state of cold (Arctic, blue diamonds; alpine, purple diamonds; Antarctic, orange diamonds) or other (white diamonds). Letters (A) – (T) denote clades predicted to have a cold tolerant MRCA based upon Bayes factor analysis. From: Chrismas et al., (2015) http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fmicb.2015.01070/full
This research will be presented as part of Nathan’s PhD thesis on genomics of cyanobacteria from cold and freshwater environments .
sanchez-baracaldo 