Metagenomics of the Methane Ice Worm, Hesiocaeca methanicola

The methane ice worm (Hesiocaeca methanicola) is a polychaete found on methane hydrate deposits for which there appears to be no publically available genomic or metagenomic data. Methane ice worms were collected in 2009 by the Johnson-Sea-Link submersible (543m depth; N 27:44.7526 W 91:13.3168). Next-generation sequencing (HiSeq2000) was applied to samples of tissue and gut contents. A subset of the assembled data (40M reads, randomly selected) was run through MG-RAST. Preliminary results for the gut content (1,269,153 sequences, average length 202 bp) indicated that 0.1% of the sequences contained ribosomal RNA genes with the majority (67%) classified as Bacteria, a relatively small per cent (1.4%) as Archae, and 31% as Eukaryota. Campylobacterales was the predominant order (14%), with unclassified (7.5%) and Desulfobacterales (4%) being the next dominant. Preliminary results for the worm tissue (2,716,461 sequences, average length 241 bp) indicated that the majority of sequences were Eukaryota (73%), with 256 sequences classified as phylum Annelida and 58% of those belonging to class Polychaeta. For the bacterial sequences obtained from the tissue samples, the predominant order was Actinomycetales (2.7%). For both the tissue and gut content samples, the majority of proteins were classified as clustering-based subsystems. This preliminary analysis will be compared to an assembly consisting of 40M of the highest quality reads.; methane ice worms on methane hydrate