The diversity of Planctomycetes in glacier sediment, and freshwater and

The phylogenetic diversity of Planctomycetes within sediment of a marine, freshwater and glacier ice environment was compared as a means to observe how time and environmental factors determine the distribution and com-position of microbial communities. Sediment was collected from Bartlett Cove, Blackwater pond and from a piece of glacier ice in March 2008 in Glacier Bay, Alaska. Clone libraries were created using primers that specifically target the 16s rDNA of the Planctomycetes-Verrucomicrobia-Chlamydiae-Lentisphaera su-perphylum. The Shannon-Weaver index for diversity of the glacier ice sediment (1.03) was found to be less than the diversity found in both the pond (3.50) and marine sediment (3.59). This provides an illustration of how microbial communities become more diverse with time. The three sequence libraries did not overlap except for one pond sequence that was found in a cluster of glacier ice sequences, suggesting that the microbial communities are being influenced from separate sources