Study of marine oil polluted marine sites by the ULIXES, MAGICPAH and KILLSPILL consortia

Trabajo presentado en el 10th International Congress on Extremophiles, celebrado en San Petesburgo (Rusia) del 07 al 11 de septiembre de 2014.Oil polluted sites are another example of extreme enviroments where the changes in the media due to contamination cause a shift in the microbial distribution, rising the presence of those species able to survive in these conditions and also with capabilities to catch and metabolize the different oil compounds like linear and branched alkanes and polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which are very recalcitrant substances that contribute to the ecological alteration of the enviroment. ULIXES, MAGICPAH and KILLSPILL are EU-funded projects focus on cataloguing and targeting, by using state-of-the-art technologies, how this type of pollution influence microbial diversity and ecology, and developing novel biorremediation methods based on novel knowledge from the results obtained by researching polluted sites. Some of the efforts in this investigation are focused in use computational techniques to identify functional groups related with degradation of pollutants generated by oil spills, providing an easier prediction of the system behaviour and the experimental analysis design. Here we describe the computational methods used to reach this goal, based on the study different oil pulluted sites across the Northern and Southern Mediterranean area and the Gulf of Aqaba (Jordan) at Red Sea.Peer Reviewe