P. A. Sobecky
The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487, USA
On April 20, 2010, the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico resulted in the loss of eleven lives and the release of an estimated 3.1 to 4.2 million barrels of oil along with methane gas into the overlying water column during an 87-day period. The spill has been referred to as one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history. We have been conducting a long term study of a coastal Alabama ecosystem that was impacted by the DWH oil spill. Sediments, water samples, and tar balls have been collected at our Alabama study site over the past 5 years beginning in June 2010. Nucleic acids from the microbial communities have been subjected to cultivation-independent genomics– based analyses including high density microarrays, 16S rRNA amplicon and metagenomic (shotgun) sequencing during this period. The goal of our 5-year study is to gain insights into the responses and changes to the salt marsh microbial community structure and function resulting from and/or associated with the DWH spill. Our objectives are to better understand the metabolic properties of microbial populations in marsh sediments from coastal Alabama in response to the oil so as to identify their roles in hydrocarbon (oil) degradation and their contributions to the recovery of ecological functions in this economically vital coastal marsh system. In addition, we are applying the same genomics-based approaches to highly weathered tar balls washed ashore in coastal Alabama during 2010 and 2011 to identify the roles and contributions of microbial populations capable of promoting aerobic and anaerobic hydrocarbon degradation of weathered oil.