Temporal analysis, characterization and geographical distribution of microbes from ancient glacial ice

• Published in: The Ohio journal of science Vol. 105; no. 1
• Main Authors: Veerapaneni, R S, D'Elia, T, Theraisnathan, V, Rogers, SO
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01.03.2005
• ISSN: 0030-0950

A glacier is a large slow moving mass of ice formed over hundreds of thousands of years. They act as a valuable reservoir of microbes, trapped and preserved in ice over this long period of time. We have isolated viable microbes like bacteria and fungi from Greenland and Antarctica ice cores at several depths(depth indicates the time period during which the microbe was trapped). Most of these microbes have been identified and are similar in their genotypes to contemporary organisms (although some differ in their ribosomal DNA intergenic spacers from described taxa). The aim of this study was to determine the geographical and temporal distribution of these microbes entrapped in ice. Ice cores from Antarctica (Vostok) and Greenland (GISP2) were used in this study. We isolated viable microbes at four different depths from these ice cores, correlating to 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 and 150,000 YBP. The genotypes of the same organisms from the same depth were compared to one another and to those of the contemporary organisms and phylogenetic analysis was done using maximum parsimony.