Title - Acquisition of a diverse chemosynthetic microbiome precedes settlement in the deep-sea, chemosymbiotic mussel Gigantic childressi.
Authors - T.F. Beaver and S.M. Arellano
Project Description - Marine invertebrates form specific associations with bacterial communities that are different from their environment, change throughout their development, and shape evolutionary and ecological processes. The bathymodiolin (Mytilidae) mussel Gigantidas childressi lives at deep-sea methane seeps and relies on methanotrophic endosymbionts for its nutrition. Its larval life, however, is spent feeding in the water column. Upon metamorphosis at a suitable seep habitat, methanotrophic bacteria rapidly colonize gill tissue and the juvenile mussel switches to symbiont-derived energy for the remainder of its life. To determine if the microbiome of the G. childressi changes during these transitions, the V3/V4 region of the 16S rRNA gene was sequenced to census the bacterial diversity within G. childressi across different developmental stages.
Repository Contents - This repository contains a pipeline for use in QIIME2 that was used for processing raw sequences and assigning taxonomy prior to statistical analysis. R code is also provided for all statistics and figures which were created in R Studio.
Link to paper: https://cedar.wwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2145&context=wwuet