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Description
Seabed hot vents are one of the most poorly understood habitats on Earth. They provide a broad range for diverse and extreme habitats with steep temperature and pH-gradients where diverse extremophilic microorganisms thrive. It is now well-established that the life in these extreme and inhospitable environments, is fueled by chemosynthesis, rather than photosynthesis, and that these habitats are our window into the first lifeforms to have emerged on our planet. Importantly, they also represent a biosphere significant for bioprospecting and biotechnology. Unfortunately, still, the vast majority of the microbial functional and biochemical diversity operating in these habitats is hidden in uncultured and yet-uncharacterized lineages. Therefore, starting at the unique biodiversity of the vents found under Norwegian waters at the Arctic Mid-Ocean Ridge, INDEPTH aims to decipher the metabolic traits and biochemical/enzymological content of this hidden reservoir. Through Polish and Norwegian complementarity of the research experience, technical expertise, knowledge and resources, and distribution, we will combine and leverage our expertise on extremophilic enzymes in Gdansk and Poznan, adaptations of extremophiles in Warsaw and ecology and bioprospecting of hot vents in Bergen. We will integrate and develop our competences in five work packages, focusing on bioinformatics-based metabolic predictions and phylogeny (WP1), adaptations (WP2), and structure/function analyses of enzymes (WP3, WP4, WP5). Fundamentally important results can be expected with substantial impact on our understanding of the ecology of microbial metabolism with the focus on carbon biogeochemical cycling, its evolution and the underlying molecular adaptations to life under the extreme conditions. The project workflow has the potential to unleash an enormous resource and improve the knowledge of enzymes operating under extreme conditions, similar to those that are of interest for industrial applications.