Every summer from 2013 to 2015, Dimitry Sorokin waded into the shallow, briny, alkaline lakes of Siberia’s Kulunda Steppe. Pale carbonate minerals crusted the pools’ edges, where lambs, too young to know the perils of drinking here, sometimes perished on the shores. As the water lapped at his thighs and abdomen, the stink of sulfur, which bubbled up along with methane from the disturbed sediments, filled his nostrils. “For me, it’s Chanel No. 5,” says the microbiologist, who splits his time between the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow and Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.
Sorokin was hoping to identify the microbes producing that methane. From his previous research, Sorokin knew that the lakes’ denizens contained a gene for part of the methane-processing methyl-coenzyme M reductase (MCR) complex, but he didn’t know which microbial species harbored the gene in their chromosomes.1 He collected mud from the pools’ bottoms ...
