Identificación molecular de líquenes de páramos colombianos y sus comunidades bacterianas asociadas

Abstract

Lichens can subsist in almost all terrestrial and aquatic habitats, even nutrient-poor surfaces such as rocks and bare soils. This makes them ecologically very important in the colonization of environments, in soil formation, and in the absorption and release of nutrients, which are used by other organisms such as plants. These characteristics demonstrate their importance in environments with extreme variations in daily temperature, scarcity of nutrients, acid soils, heavy rainfall and high ultraviolet radiation, such as the páramos, most of which are concentrated in Colombian territory with more than 50% of their extension. Colombia is home to at least 10% of the lichen species described in the world. In the páramos, 264 species have been described so far, and recent findings suggest that a large number of unrecognized taxa may exist in Colombia, which increases the richness of known species by a large magnitude. Despite the importance of lichens for these ecosystems, there is still a limited understanding of their biology. Not only because of the lack of knowledge of the microbial species that compose these associations, but also because of the factors that determine their assemblage. Therefore, this project seeks to solve these questions in some species of the genus Cora, Stereocaulon and Sticta, which are easily found in the Cerro Machín Volcano (Tolima, Colombia) and in the Sumapaz, Chingaza and Verjón Paramos (Cundinamarca, Colombia). In this work we characterized the different microbiota associated with closely related lichens in specific environmental conditions such as those of the páramo to identify molecularly the lichen species and to make an initial inventory of the bacterial species that inhabit them. In such a way that it can later be determined if some of these exhibit a correlation between microbiota and host evolution, or if there is a geographical component that determines the assemblage of these microbial communities.