Over the 21st century the ecosystems in both Polar Regions are facing significant change. These changes may affect the spatio-temporal dynamics of sea ice, such as the duration of melt and freeze periods and the inner structure, long before affecting the areal sea ice coverage in a region. Sea ice microbial communities (bacteria and protists) are likely to respond strongly to dynamic changes in sea ice, with repercussions on productivity, nutrient cycling and other ecosystem functions. Their relationship with sea ice habitat properties as well as their own spatio-temporal dynamics and inter-relationships, however, are barely understood. This hampers the ability to predict the impact of environmental change on the microbial system and associated ecosystem functions. This Master thesis project aims at characterising the structure of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice microbial communities, their relationships with habitat properties, and patterns of inter-action and co-existence between taxa in a set of selected sea ice and under ice samples. In this Master project next generation sequencing (NGS) was used for molecular based characterisation of microbial communities in a set of selected samples collected in the Weddle Sea and the Fram Strait. Overall the approach includes the extraction of genomic DNA from the samples, amplification of the V4 region of the 18S rDNA, sequencing of the 18S rDNA amplicons via Illumina-sequencing using the MiSeq-sequencer of the section, taxonomic annotation of sequences using an established annotation pipeline and finally multivariate statistical analyses in order to elucidate the impact of variable sea ice habitat properties on microbial community composition.
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