Resumo

Harboring activities stand out as important threats to coastal ecosystems, leading to environmental modifications caused by water, air, and sediments pollution. Pollutants are released during everyday or accidental activities, inducing contamination phenomena and changes in the communities that occupy that place. Therefore, nowadays, big scientific efforts must be done to mitigate anthropogenic pressures to the environment, and the better way to start doing so is trying to understand the biota present in impacted ecosystems. In this sense, this work reports preliminary data on the richness of OTUs present in two port regions of Ceara state, the Mucuripe Port, located at the metropolitan area and counting on 49 years of operation, and the Pecém Port, away 60 km from the capital city and operating for 11 years. Sediment was aseptically sampled in November/2011 with a Van Veen collector. Collection points’ deepth ranged from 15 to 20 m, with pH of 7.5-7.6, salinity of 40, and water transparency of 1.9 to 2.9 m. In order to cover all the ports operational zones, the points were sited 200 m distant from each other, in a total of 15 points for Mucuripe and 10 for Pecém. Total DNA of each point was extracted and combined in one single DNA sample for each port. Such DNA samples were amplified with the primers 338F GC and 518R for Bacteria domain, and 340F GC and 519R for Archaea. Then they were applied in DGGE, and the resulting banding patterns analyzed using the Bionumerics software. For the Bacteria domain, 32 OTUs were found in Mucuripe and 29 in Pecém, with 12 and 9 exclusive for Mucuripe and Pecém, respectively, and 20 shared OTUs. For Archaea, there were 32 OTUs for Mucuripe and 31 for Pecém, with, respectively, 13 and 12 exclusive and 19 shared OTUs. Based on those results, it is possible to speculate that the OTUs shared between both ports possibly consist of organisms adapted to the harboring environment, while the exclusive ones may reflect the operational history of each port as well as it particular geomorphological and naval architectural characteristics. These results represent a primary characterization of the microbial richness found in Brazilian port environments, which are being studied along with the abiotic conditions in order to decipher the factors that could determinate the community structure of Bacteria and Archaea in these environments.