Responses of Kazakhstan Saline Lakes to Environmental Changes

Faculty Development Competitive Research Grant Program (General) 2024-2026

 We apply for funding to cover the costs of exploration of hypersaline and saline lakes with the aim to study the effect of variations in salinity on inland hypersaline, saline, and brackish lake ecosystems, respectively, in response to environmental changes. Through this research, answers to the following questions will be found: What microorganisms are present in the lake waters of hypersaline, saline, and brackish Kazakhstani lakes? How changes in the gradient of salinity correlate with changes in the dynamics of microbial and phytoplankton communities in these lake's ecosystems? How environmental changes affect the saline lakes' microbial communities dynamics? Microbial community co-occurrence networks and their properties can be a biomonitoring tool to assess aquatic health and characterize system-level responses to environmental change including anthropogenic disturbances.
The results of the project will provide the first intact and complete samples of microbial communities in parallel with phytoplankton from the water strata of remnant Aral Sea lakes. We hypothesize that variations in salinity govern the evolution of microbial communities and linked microalgal communities. To differentiate microalgal taxa in the water sample, we are developing a new spectral cytometry method (allowing us to differentiate >20 different taxa in the sample) and adopted a novel nanopore-based next-generation sequencing pipeline to identify microbial communities on the species level. The project will test this hypothesis by analyzing two diverse saline ecosystems: remnant lakes of former Aral Sea (Thushebas Bay, Chernyshev Bay and South (West) Aral) in remote part of Kazakhstan and a wide gradient of salinity in Tengiz-Kargalzhyn system of lakes in proximity to Astana.