Data Mining and Bioinformatics Approaches to Elucidate Bacterial Communities in the Extreme Environment

Bacteria are microscopic organisms that can be found in many environments. They are abundant and have many roles in our life. Studying bacteria is essential so that we can identify the bacteria that are needed for many industrial applications. However, the main problem is that majority of the bacteria are unculturable, hampering the exploration of bacteria from different environments. Metagenomics approach which employs Next Generation Sequencing technology could help study bacteria by utilizing 16S rRNA marker gene. This study aims to demonstrate data mining and bioinformatics approaches to analyze 16S rRNA sequencing data. The raw sequencing data of 16S rRNA was collected from biological database. Then, the data were trimmed, denoised, and clustered to generate Amplicon Sequence Variants (ASVs). Diversity (alpha and beta) and taxonomic analyses were then conducted to elucidate the bacterial diversity and taxonomic profile of ASVs. The results of this work showed that Shannon and PD indices in China's hot spring were higher than Singapore and the USA. Furthermore, a significant difference was observed in the PD index. The unweighted UniFrac distance also showed there was a significant difference of the bacterial communities between the three locations. In addition, the taxonomic investigation unveiled prevalent bacterial groups in the ecosystem, namely Proteobacteria, Chloroflexi, Cyanobacteria, and Crenarchaeota. The research outcomes have the potential to serve as a foundational resource for subsequent bacterial metagenomic research, particularly the hot spring environment.