Publications by authors named "A Zoumplis"
The meltwater streams of the McMurdo Dry Valleys are hot spots of biological diversity in the climate-sensitive polar desert landscape. Microbial mats, largely comprised of cyanobacteria, dominate the streams which flow for a brief window of time (~10 weeks) over the austral summer. These communities, critical to nutrient and carbon cycling, display previously uncharacterized patterns of rapid destabilization and recovery upon exposure to variable and physiologically detrimental conditions.
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- Diatom communities in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica, are influenced by environmental, historical, and spatial factors related to how organisms disperse.
- Wind plays a crucial role in transporting diatoms and nutrients between aquatic habitats in the region, with significant concentrations of diatoms found in aeolian (wind-blown) material.
- The study found that a large percentage of the diatoms present in aeolian material were viable, linking local aquatic habitats and suggesting that while aeolian communities share species with nearby aquatic environments, they also exhibit distinct structures influenced by local dispersal and environmental factors.
Following the Astrobiology Roadmap: Origins, Habitability and Future Exploration.
Curr Issues Mol Biol
October 2020
Astrobiology asks three fundamental questions as outlined by the NASA Astrobiology Roadmap: 1. How did Life begin and evolve?; Is there Life elsewhere in the Universe?; and, What is the future of Life on Earth? As we gain perspective on how Life on Earth arose and adapted to its many niches, we too gain insight into how a planet achieves habitability. Here on Earth, microbial Life has evolved to exist in a wide range of habitats from aquatic systems to deserts, the human body, and the International Space Station (ISS).
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