Brine pools are characterized as one of the harshest natures on earth, with absence of light, high pressure and drastic change in temperature, salinity and oxygen concentration. Yet, brine pools show stable environments and their interface layer forms a barrier that prevents the mixing between sea water and brine water. The presence of microbes that survive in such unusual conditions provides interesting resources to understand the dynamics and underlying control mechanisms on deep-sea prokaryotic communities which remain poorly explored at the Red Sea deep anoxic brines.
In this study, we aim to investigate the role of top-down control (viral lysis and protistan grazing) on bacterial standing stocks focusing on the brine-seawater interface layer of three geochemically different brine pools of the Red Sea.