A deep sleep in coal beds Deep below the ocean floor, microorganisms from forest soils continue to thrive. Inagaki et al. analyzed the microbial communities in several drill cores off the coast of Japan, some sampling more than 2 km below the seafloor (see the Perspective by Huber). Although cell counts decreased with depth, deep coal beds harbored active communities of methanogenic bacteria. These communities were more similar to those found in forest soils than in other deep marine sediments. Science , this issue p. 420 ; see also p. 376

The methane-rich, hydrothermally heated sediments of the Guaymas Basin are inhabited by thermophilic microorganisms, including anaerobic methane-oxidizing archaea (mainly ANME-1) and sulfatereducing bacteria (e.g., HotSeep-1 cluster). We studied the microbial carbon flow in ANME-1/ HotSeep-1 enrichments in stable-isotopeprobing experiments with and without methane. The relative incorporation of 13 C from either dissolved inorganic carbon or methane into lipids revealed that methane-oxidizing archaea assimilated primarily inorganic carbon. This assimilation is strongly accelerated in the presence of methane. Experiments with simultaneous amendments of both 13 C-labeled dissolved inorganic carbon and deuterated water provided further insights into production rates of individual lipids derived from members of the methane-oxidizing community as well as their carbon sources used for lipid biosynthesis. In the presence of methane, all prominent lipids carried a dual isotopic signal indicative of their origin from primarily autotrophic microbes. In the absence of methane, archaeal lipid production ceased and bacterial lipid production dropped by 90%; the lipids produced by the residual fraction of the metabolically active bacterial community predominantly carried a heterotrophic signal. Collectively our results strongly suggest that the studied ANME-1 archaea oxidize methane but assimilate inorganic carbon and should thus be classified as methane-oxidizing chemoorganoautotrophs.methanotrophy | biomarker | acetyl-CoA pathway | syntrophy M ethane is an important greenhouse gas and the most abundant hydrocarbon in marine sediments. Its upward flux to the sediment-water interface is strongly reduced by sulfate-dependent anaerobic oxidation of methane (AOM) (1, 2). AOM is performed by syntrophic associations of anaerobic methane-oxidizing archaea (ANMEs) (3, 4) and their sulfate-reducing bacterial partners (SRBs) (mainly relatives of Desulfosarcina or Desulfobulbus) (5-8). The free energy yield of the AOM net reaction is one of the lowest known for catabolic reactions under environmental conditions (ΔG ranges from -20 to -40 kJ·mol -1 ; e.g., refs. 9, 10). Consequently, activity and biomass doubling times determined under optimized laboratory conditions range from 2 to 5 mo (11) and growth yields are extremely low, around 1% relative to oxidized methane (11,12). The biomass of ANMEs and SRBs involved in AOM is usually strongly depleted in 13 C. For instance, at methane seep locations, the δ 13 C values of specific bacterial fatty acids and archaeal ether lipids range from -60 to -100‰ and -70 to -130‰, respectively (e.g., refs. 13-17). Such low values have been interpreted as evidence for the incorporation of 13 C-depleted methane into biomass (e.g., refs. 3, 4, 18).One way to identify the carbon sources of microbial biomass is to perform stable-isotope-probing (SIP) experiments (19), followed by analysis of biomolecules such as membrane lipids (lipid-SIP hereafter). Application of lipid-SIP to cold seep sediments and micro...

No abstract

No abstract