Aerobic microbial life persists in oxic marine sediment as old as 101.5 million years

Yuki Morono (), Motoo Ito, Tatsuhiko Hoshino, Takeshi Terada, Tomoyuki Hori, Minoru Ikehara, Steven D’Hondt () and Fumio Inagaki ()
Additional contact information
Yuki Morono: Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC)
Motoo Ito: Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC)
Tatsuhiko Hoshino: Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC)
Takeshi Terada: Marine Works Japan Ltd
Tomoyuki Hori: National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)
Minoru Ikehara: Kochi University
Steven D’Hondt: University of Rhode Island
Fumio Inagaki: Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC)

Nature Communications, 2020, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract Sparse microbial populations persist from seafloor to basement in the slowly accumulating oxic sediment of the oligotrophic South Pacific Gyre (SPG). The physiological status of these communities, including their substrate metabolism, is previously unconstrained. Here we show that diverse aerobic members of communities in SPG sediments (4.3‒101.5 Ma) are capable of readily incorporating carbon and nitrogen substrates and dividing. Most of the 6986 individual cells analyzed with nanometer-scale secondary ion mass spectrometry (NanoSIMS) actively incorporated isotope-labeled substrates. Many cells responded rapidly to incubation conditions, increasing total numbers by 4 orders of magnitude and taking up labeled carbon and nitrogen within 68 days after incubation. The response was generally faster (on average, 3.09 times) for nitrogen incorporation than for carbon incorporation. In contrast, anaerobic microbes were only minimally revived from this oxic sediment. Our results suggest that microbial communities widely distributed in organic-poor abyssal sediment consist mainly of aerobes that retain their metabolic potential under extremely low-energy conditions for up to 101.5 Ma.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17330-1 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:11:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-020-17330-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-17330-1

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().