PLAYING A PART: Members of the phylum Bathyarchaeota are abundant in marine sediments, where they take up carbon from organic compounds in the surrounding environment. A recent study has shown that they also have the potential to fix inorganic carbon—in the form of carbon dioxide (CO2)—to generate acetate, an important fuel for other sediment-dwelling organisms such as methanogens (which include marine archaea) and heterotrophic bacteria. The products of these organisms feed back into the carbon cycle in marine sediments, where they may be consumed by other microbes.© THOM GRAVES
The paper
Y. He et al., “Genomic and enzymatic evidence for acetogenesis among multiple lineages of the archaeal phylum Bathyarchaeota widespread in marine sediments,” Nat Microbiol, 16035, 2016.
Microbial ecologist Fengping Wang was not looking for archaea. She just couldn’t stop finding them. A couple of years ago at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Wang was investigating the composition of marine sediments, expecting to turn up primarily bacteria. Instead, she says, “I kept detecting archaea. Repeatedly, they were coming up in almost every sample I studied.”
Wang was puzzled. Archaea have traditionally been thought of as extremophiles, living unusual lifestyles in unusual environments, such as in hot springs or the Arctic. Even though that view is changing as more and more studies identify archaea in diverse ...
