Table 1.
Nutrient and biomass data for microbial mat samples.
Fig 1.
Pictures and location of the microbial mats collected.
In situ images of the sampled microbial mats. (A) Fildes in Maritime Antarctica, (B) Esperanza in Antarctic Peninsula, and (C) Garwood in McMurdo Dry Valleys. Location of sampling sites in western Antarctica: Maritime, Antarctic Peninsula, and McMurdo Dry Valleys. The red dots represent the geographic sites where microbial mats and water were collected. Map was obtained from the Quantarctica package (http://quantarctica.npolar.no/) and plotted in QGIS v3.28.10 (http://www.qgis.org).
Fig 2.
Relationship between sampling sites and nutrient concentration vectors (SRSi, SRP, NO2-, NO3-, NH4 + , DIN, and DIN:SRP ratio). The length and direction of the vectors indicate the contribution of each nutrient to the variation in the dataset. The color gradient represents the cos² values, indicating the quality of representation of each nutrient in the ordination.
Fig 3.
Taxonomic composition of Antarctic microbial mats.
Abundances at read level greater than 1%. A) The phyla with the highest abundance in the microbial mats are Bacteroidota, Pseudomonadota, and Cyanobacteriota, with 80% + /- 10%, and Bacillariophyta in the mats of Maritime Antarctica. B) Most abundant genera in microbial mats.
Fig 4.
Eukaryotic proportion comparison and gene distribution between metagenomes.
Eukaryotic gene counts are shown for the 14 microbial mats, organized by the top ten eukaryotic phyla with the highest number of genes. The figure reveals the specific distribution of eukaryotic genes in the communities, highlighting the variation in gene abundance for the differentially abundance in phylum Bacillariophyta. (A) the difference between mean proportions (read level) for six genera of the phylum Bacillariophyta. The figure highlights that Bacillariophyta are differentially abundant in samples from Fildes (MA) compared to Garwood (DV). (B) Distribution of eukaryotic genes as a function of gene counts per million reads (GPM) and Clusters of Orthologous Genes (COGs) categories.