In New Zealand's North Island we have large geothermal areas
and the expression of these geothermal areas
is volcanoes, large heated lakes,
even geysers - where water is ejected out of the ground into the air,
hot springs and steaming soils.
So in the 1000 springs project
we're trying to do something that's never been done before.
We are sampling 1000 springs across the Taupo volcanic zone
in as many different physical and chemical conditions as we can we can get,
no matter what acidity or alkalinity,
and no matter what temperature,
there will be life in all of these hot springs.
Certainly there are billions of microorganisms per litre of water in these springs.
In the 1000 springs project one of the aims is to do a stocktake
of the microorganisms that inhabit the geothermal systems in New Zealand.
At the present moment we have absolutely no idea what species exist in these pools,
or even the numbers of species.
we have no idea whether the microorganisms in one pool are globally unique
- never found anywhere else in the world,
or if they're found everywhere.
we don't really understand how microorganisms move from one place to the next.
A hot spring is like a continent for a microorganism.
moving from one hot spring to the next hot spring
is actually a really difficult logistical challenge
microorganisms are able to deal with these really unusual conditions
and if they can do that then we might be able to harness
some of their abilities for biotechnologies.
Today we're at Whakarewarewa village in Rotorua.
It has got hundreds of different hot springs.
they're all varieties of shapes and colors, temperatures, acidities.
So when we arrive at the hot spring
we first of all make sure it's safe to sample
We then take the temperature, record that
and then we take four different water samples
some of them are to determine to what chemicals are within the the the Springwater.
Some are to determine what gases are in the spring water.
And then we also take a water sample
to filter the microorganisms for later extraction in the lab.
we determine what microorganisms are in the hot spring samples
by extracting their DNA and comparing it to a global database.
It takes 15 minutes to sample each spring,
so in a day we're aiming to sample ten to twelve hot springs
and then we take them back to the lab.
So we're going to process the samples were collected today at whakarewarewa.
Jean and Dave are about to filter the samples.
This is the microbiology lab that we do it in, it's a nice clean environment
So here's two of our samples that we took earlier today
we've got 582 and 583
and each of them is hooked up to this peristaltic pump.
This is the column filter.
The pump pushes the sample through it,
and the filter is so small (0.2 of a micron) that most microbes will be caught on the filter.
The next part of the whole process
is we do a DNA extraction on that filter.
What the DNA extraction does, is crack open the cells,
and we are able to get access to the DNA of the microorganisms in there.
We then isolate he DNA from these microorganisms trapped on the filter
to use it to identify the microorganisms in the sample
This is an image of what we get from that reading.
So if we go over here we take the DNA sequence we just saw,
and we can represent them in a different way.
What we have here is a pie chart
that shows the microbial species that inhabit this hot spring.
If you imagine this pie chart as wedges of a pie,
the larger the wedge, the more that particular microorganism is present in that hot spring.
This wedge here represents the majority of bacteria in this hot spring
and these little wedges here a minor components of the hot spring.
At the end of all the sampling we have tried to measure as many physical conditions of the spring.
And we also have information on the microbes living in there.
so we know what's living there, we know the physical conditions of the spring,
so we're looking at the links between the two.
From all this information we're getting a deeper understanding
of what's going on in these hot springs,
where the microorganisms are getting their nutrients from,
how they're surviving, and how they are different from each other.
This project is in the early phases of discovery,
We've never undertaken such a project before in the in the history microbial ecology in New Zealand.
We don't know what we're going to find.
It's all very exciting, there's there's lots of things to to understand about this
crucial part of global ecosystems.
I'm sure that we're going to be finding new discoveries,
and generating new knowledge about these the fascinating and crucial life forms
that we know so little about, but are absolutely everywhere in our world.