Deciphering the functional and structural complexity of the Solar Lake flat mat microbial benthic communities
Authors: Abdallah Rehab Z. , Elbehery Ali H. A. , Ahmed Shimaa F. , Ouf Amged , Malash Mohamed N. , Liesack Werner , Siam Rania 
Published: May 2024

The Solar Lake in Taba, Egypt, encompasses one of the few modern-day microbial mats’ systems metabolically analogous to Precambrian stromatolites. Solar Lake benthic communities and their adaptation to the Lake’s unique limnological cycle have not been described for over two decades. In this study, we revisit the flat mat and describe the summer’s shallow water versus exposed microbial community; the latter occurs in response to the seasonal partial receding of water. We employed metagenomic NovaSeq-6000 shotgun sequencing and 16S rRNA,
mcrA,
and
dsrB
quantitative PCR. A total of 292 medium-to-high-quality metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) were reconstructed. At the structural level,
Candidatus
Aenigmatarchaeota, Micrarchaeota, and Omnitrophota MAGs were exclusively detected in the shallow-water mats, whereas
Halobacteria
and
Myxococcota
MAGs were specific to the exposed microbial mat. Functionally, genes involved in reactive oxygen species (ROS) detoxification and osmotic pressure were more abundant in the exposed than in the shallow-water microbial mats, whereas genes involved in sulfate reduction/oxidation and nitrogen fixation were ubiquitously detected. Genes involved in the utilization of methylated amines for methane production were predominant when compared with genes associated with alternative methanogenesis pathways. Solar Lake methanogen MAGs belonged to
Methanosarcinia
,
Bathyarchaeia
,
Candidatus
Methanofastidiosales
,
and
Archaeoglobales
. The latter had the genetic capacity for anaerobic methane oxidation. Moreover,
Coleofasciculus chthonoplastes
, previously reported to dominate the winter shallow-water flat mat, had a substantial presence in the summer. These findings reveal the taxonomic and biochemical microbial zonation of the exposed and shallow-water Solar Lake flat mat benthic community and their capacity to ecologically adapt to the summer water recession.

IMPORTANCE

Fifty-five years ago, the extremophilic “Solar Lake” was discovered on the Red Sea shores, garnering microbiologists’ interest worldwide from the 1970s to 1990s. Nevertheless, research on the lake paused at the turn of the millennium. In our study, we revisited the Solar Lake benthic community using a genome-centric approach and described the distinct microbial communities in the exposed versus shallow-water mat unveiling microbial zonation in the benthic communities surrounding the Solar Lake. Our findings highlighted the unique structural and functional adaptations employed by these microbial mat communities. Moreover, we report new methanogens and phototrophs, including an intriguing methanogen from the
Archaeoglobales
family. We describe how the Solar Lake’s flat mat microbial community adapts to stressors like oxygen intrusion and drought due to summer water level changes, which provides insights into the genomic strategies of microbial communities to cope with altered and extreme environmental conditions.