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Dang CC, Jin YZ, Tan X, Nie WB, Lu Y, Liu BF, Xing DF, Ren NQ, Xie GJ. Nitrite-driven anaerobic ethane oxidation. ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND ECOTECHNOLOGY 2024; 21:100438. [PMID: 39036799 PMCID: PMC11259786 DOI: 10.1016/j.ese.2024.100438] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/09/2024] [Revised: 06/08/2024] [Accepted: 06/08/2024] [Indexed: 07/23/2024]
Abstract
Ethane, the second most abundant gaseous hydrocarbon in vast anoxic environments, is an overlooked greenhouse gas. Microbial anaerobic oxidation of ethane can be driven by available electron acceptors such as sulfate and nitrate. However, despite nitrite being a more thermodynamically feasible electron acceptor than sulfate or nitrate, little is known about nitrite-driven anaerobic ethane oxidation. In this study, a microbial culture capable of nitrite-driven anaerobic ethane oxidation was enriched through the long-term operation of a nitrite-and-ethane-fed bioreactor. During continuous operation, the nitrite removal rate and the theoretical ethane oxidation rate remained stable at approximately 25.0 mg NO2 -N L-1 d-1 and 11.48 mg C2H6 L-1 d-1, respectively. Batch tests demonstrated that ethane is essential for nitrite removal in this microbial culture. Metabolic function analysis revealed that a species affiliated with a novel genus within the family Rhodocyclaceae, designated as 'Candidatus Alkanivoras nitrosoreducens', may perform the nitrite-driven anaerobic ethane oxidation. In the proposed metabolic model, despite the absence of known genes for ethane conversion to ethyl-succinate and succinate-CoA ligase, 'Ca. A. nitrosoreducens' encodes a prospective fumarate addition pathway for anaerobic ethane oxidation and a complete denitrification pathway for nitrite reduction to nitrogen. These findings advance our understanding of nitrite-driven anaerobic ethane oxidation, highlighting the previously overlooked impact of anaerobic ethane oxidation in natural ecosystems.
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Affiliation(s)
- Cheng-Cheng Dang
- State Key Laboratory of Urban Water Resource and Environment, School of Environment, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, 150090, China
| | - Yin-Zhu Jin
- State Key Laboratory of Urban Water Resource and Environment, School of Environment, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, 150090, China
| | - Xin Tan
- State Key Laboratory of Urban Water Resource and Environment, School of Environment, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, 150090, China
| | - Wen-Bo Nie
- Key Laboratory of the Three Gorges Region's Eco-Environment, Ministry of Education, College of Environment and Ecology, Chongqing University, Chongqing, 400044, China
| | - Yang Lu
- Water Innovation and Smart Environment Laboratory, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Queensland, 4001, Australia
| | - Bing-Feng Liu
- State Key Laboratory of Urban Water Resource and Environment, School of Environment, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, 150090, China
| | - De-Feng Xing
- State Key Laboratory of Urban Water Resource and Environment, School of Environment, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, 150090, China
| | - Nan-Qi Ren
- State Key Laboratory of Urban Water Resource and Environment, School of Environment, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, 150090, China
| | - Guo-Jun Xie
- State Key Laboratory of Urban Water Resource and Environment, School of Environment, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, 150090, China
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Su L, Teske AP, MacGregor BJ, McKay LJ, Mendlovitz H, Albert D, Ma Z, Li J. Thermal Selection of Microbial Communities and Preservation of Microbial Function in Guaymas Basin Hydrothermal Sediments. Appl Environ Microbiol 2023; 89:e0001823. [PMID: 36847505 PMCID: PMC10057036 DOI: 10.1128/aem.00018-23] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/10/2023] [Accepted: 01/27/2023] [Indexed: 03/01/2023] Open
Abstract
The Guaymas Basin in the Gulf of California is characterized by active seafloor spreading, hydrothermal activity, and organic matter accumulation on the seafloor due to high sedimentation rates. In the hydrothermal sediments of Guaymas Basin, microbial community compositions and coexistence patterns change across steep gradients of temperature, potential carbon sources, and electron acceptors. Nonmetric multidimensional scaling and guanine-cytosine percentage analyses reveal that the bacterial and archaeal communities adjust compositionally to their local temperature regime. Functional inference using PICRUSt shows that microbial communities consistently maintain their predicted biogeochemical functions in different sediments. Phylogenetic profiling shows that microbial communities retain distinct sulfate-reducing, methane-oxidizing, or heterotrophic lineages within specific temperature windows. The preservation of similar biogeochemical functions across microbial lineages with different temperature adaptations stabilizes the hydrothermal microbial community in a highly dynamic environment. IMPORTANCE Hydrothermal vent sites have been widely studied to investigate novel bacteria and archaea that are adapted to these extreme environments. However, community-level analyses of hydrothermal microbial ecosystems look beyond the presence and activity of particular types of microbes and examine to what extent the entire community of bacteria and archaea is adapted to hydrothermal conditions; these include elevated temperatures, hydrothermally generated carbon sources, and inorganic electron donors and acceptors that are characteristic for hydrothermal environments. In our case study of bacterial and archaeal communities in hydrothermal sediments of Guaymas Basin, we found that sequence-inferred microbial function was maintained in differently structured bacterial and archaeal communities across different samples and thermal regimes. The resulting preservation of biogeochemical functions across thermal gradients is an important factor in explaining the consistency of the microbial core community in the dynamic sedimentary environment of Guaymas Basin.
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Affiliation(s)
- Lei Su
- State Key Laboratory of Marine Geology, Tongji University, Shanghai, China
| | - Andreas P. Teske
- Department of Marine Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
| | - Barbara J. MacGregor
- Department of Marine Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
- Department of Earth Sciences, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
| | - Luke J. McKay
- Department of Marine Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
| | - Howard Mendlovitz
- Department of Marine Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
| | - Daniel Albert
- Department of Marine Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
| | - Zhonglin Ma
- State Key Laboratory of Marine Geology, Tongji University, Shanghai, China
| | - Jiangtao Li
- State Key Laboratory of Marine Geology, Tongji University, Shanghai, China
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Edgcomb VP, Teske AP, Mara P. Microbial Hydrocarbon Degradation in Guaymas Basin-Exploring the Roles and Potential Interactions of Fungi and Sulfate-Reducing Bacteria. Front Microbiol 2022; 13:831828. [PMID: 35356530 PMCID: PMC8959706 DOI: 10.3389/fmicb.2022.831828] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/08/2021] [Accepted: 02/04/2022] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
Hydrocarbons are degraded by specialized types of bacteria, archaea, and fungi. Their occurrence in marine hydrocarbon seeps and sediments prompted a study of their role and their potential interactions, using the hydrocarbon-rich hydrothermal sediments of Guaymas Basin in the Gulf of California as a model system. This sedimented vent site is characterized by localized hydrothermal circulation that introduces seawater sulfate into methane- and hydrocarbon-rich sediments, and thus selects for diverse hydrocarbon-degrading communities of which methane, alkane- and aromatics-oxidizing sulfate-reducing bacteria and archaea have been especially well-studied. Current molecular and cultivation surveys are detecting diverse fungi in Guaymas Basin hydrothermal sediments, and draw attention to possible fungal-bacterial interactions. In this Hypothesis and Theory article, we report on background, recent results and outcomes, and underlying hypotheses that guide current experiments on this topic in the Edgcomb and Teske labs in 2021, and that we will revisit during our ongoing investigations of bacterial, archaeal, and fungal communities in the deep sedimentary subsurface of Guaymas Basin.
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Affiliation(s)
| | - Andreas P. Teske
- Department of Earth, Marine and Environmental Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, United States
| | - Paraskevi Mara
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA, United States
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Chen SC, Ji J, Popp D, Jaekel U, Richnow HH, Sievert SM, Musat F. Genome and proteome analyses show the gaseous alkane degrader Desulfosarcina sp. strain BuS5 as an extreme metabolic specialist. Environ Microbiol 2022; 24:1964-1976. [PMID: 35257474 DOI: 10.1111/1462-2920.15956] [Citation(s) in RCA: 7] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/09/2022] [Accepted: 02/23/2022] [Indexed: 11/30/2022]
Abstract
The metabolic potential of the sulfate-reducing bacterium Desulfosarcina sp. strain BuS5, currently the only pure culture able to oxidize the volatile alkanes propane and butane without oxygen, was investigated via genomics, proteomics and physiology assays. Complete genome sequencing revealed that strain BuS5 encodes a single alkyl-succinate synthase, an enzyme which apparently initiates oxidation of both propane and butane. The formed alkyl-succinates are oxidized to CO2 via beta oxidation and the oxidative Wood-Ljungdahl pathways as shown by proteogenomics analyses. Strain BuS5 conserves energy via the canonical sulfate reduction pathway and electron bifurcation. An ability to utilize long-chain fatty acids, mannose and oligopeptides, suggested by automated annotation pipelines, was not supported by physiology assays and in-depth analyses of the corresponding genetic systems. Consistently, comparative genomics revealed a streamlined BuS5 genome with a remarkable paucity of catabolic modules. These results establish strain BuS5 as an exceptional metabolic specialist, able to grow only with propane and butane, for which we propose the name Desulfosarcina aeriophaga BuS5. This highly restrictive lifestyle, most likely the result of habitat-driven evolutionary gene loss, may provide D. aeriophaga BuS5 a competitive edge in sediments impacted by natural gas seeps. Etymology: Desulfosarcina aeriophaga, aério (Greek): gas; phágos (Greek): eater; D. aeriophaga: a gas eating or gas feeding Desulfosarcina.
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Affiliation(s)
- Song-Can Chen
- Department of Isotope Biogeochemistry, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ, Leipzig, Germany
| | - Jiaheng Ji
- Department of Isotope Biogeochemistry, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ, Leipzig, Germany
| | - Denny Popp
- Department of Environmental Microbiology, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ, Leipzig, Germany
| | | | - Hans-Hermann Richnow
- Department of Isotope Biogeochemistry, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ, Leipzig, Germany
| | - Stefan M Sievert
- Biology Department, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA, 02543, USA
| | - Florin Musat
- Department of Isotope Biogeochemistry, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ, Leipzig, Germany.,Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, Faculty of Biology and Geology, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
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Leinberger J, Milke F, Christodoulou M, Poehlein A, Caraveo-Patiño J, Teske A, Brinkhoff T. Microbial epibiotic community of the deep-sea galatheid squat lobster Munidopsis alvisca. Sci Rep 2022; 12:2675. [PMID: 35177734 PMCID: PMC8854721 DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-06666-x] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/04/2021] [Accepted: 02/01/2022] [Indexed: 11/18/2022] Open
Abstract
Life at hydrothermal vent sites is based on chemosynthetic primary producers that supply heterotrophic microorganisms with substrates and generate biomass for higher trophic levels. Often, chemoautotrophs associate with the hydrothermal vent megafauna. To investigate attached bacterial and archaeal communities on deep-sea squat lobsters, we collected ten specimens from a hydrothermal vent in the Guaymas Basin (Gulf of California). All animals were identified as Munidopsis alvisca via morphological and molecular classification, and intraspecific divergence was determined. Amplicon sequencing of microbial DNA and cDNA revealed significant differences between microbial communities on the carapaces of M. alvisca and those in ambient sea water. Major epibiotic bacterial taxa were chemoautotrophic Gammaproteobacteria, such as Thiotrichaceae and Methylococcaceae, while archaea were almost exclusively represented by sequences affiliated with Ca. Nitrosopumilus. In sea water samples, Marine Group II and III archaea and organoheterotrophic Alphaproteobacteria, Flavobacteriia and Planctomycetacia were more dominant. Based on the identified taxa, we assume that main metabolic processes, carried out by M. alvisca epibiota, include ammonia, methane and sulphide oxidation. Considering that M. alvisca could benefit from sulphide detoxification by its epibiota, and that attached microbes are supplied with a stable habitat in proximity to substrate-rich hydrothermal fluids, a mutualistic host-microbe relationship appears likely.
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Affiliation(s)
- Janina Leinberger
- Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment, University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany
| | - Felix Milke
- Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment, University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany
| | - Magdalini Christodoulou
- German Centre for Marine Biodiversity Research (DZMB), Senckenberg am Meer, Wilhelmshaven, Germany
| | - Anja Poehlein
- Genomic and Applied Microbiology and Göttingen Genomics Laboratory, Institute of Microbiology and Genetics, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany
| | | | - Andreas Teske
- Department of Earth, Marine and Environmental Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, USA
| | - Thorsten Brinkhoff
- Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment, University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany.
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