Biogeographic distribution of five Antarctic cyanobacteria using large-scale k-mer searching with sourmash branchwater

Cyanobacteria form diverse communities and are important primary producers in Antarctic freshwater environments, but their geographic distribution patterns in Antarctica and globally are still unresolved. There are however few genomes of cultured cyanobacteria from Antarctica available and therefore metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) from Antarctic cyanobacteria microbial mats provide an opportunity to explore distribution of uncultured taxa. These MAGs also allow comparison with metagenomes of cyanobacteria enriched communities from a range of habitats, geographic locations, and climates. However, most MAGs do not contain 16S rRNA gene sequences, making a 16S rRNA gene-based biogeography comparison difficult. An alternative technique is to use large-scale k-mer searching to find genomes of interest in public metagenomes. This paper presents the results of k-mer based searches for 5 Antarctic cyanobacteria MAGs from Lake Fryxell and Lake Vanda, assigned the names FRX01, sp. MP8IB2.171, sp. BulkMat.35, MP8IB2.15, and MP9P1.79 in 498,942 unassembled metagenomes from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) Sequence Read Archive (SRA). The sp. MP8IB2.171 MAG was found in a wide variety of environments, the MAG was found in environments with challenging conditions, the MP9P1.79 MAG was only found in Antarctica, and the sp. BulkMat.35 and MP8IB2.15 MAGs were found in Antarctic and other cold environments. The findings based on metagenome matches and global comparisons suggest that these Antarctic cyanobacteria have distinct distribution patterns ranging from locally restricted to global distribution across the cold biosphere and other climatic zones.