A hypersaline salt lake in southeastern Siberia with halite crystal deposition; the red color is due to a high density of haloarchaea in the brines.DIMITRY SOROKINMany strains of archaea are capable of living in environments with high salt concentrations, and others are able to produce methane, but only a few can do both. In a study published today (May 26) in Nature Microbiology, researchers identified and cultured two lineages of methane-generating archaea that thrive in salty lakes. The two strains—part of a class the authors named “Methanonatronarchaeia”—appear to be most closely related to the Halobacteria, a class of archaea found in salt-rich environments worldwide.
“The halophilic archaea had long been suspected to have evolved from a lineage of methanogens, and this new lineage is the missing link confirming this hypothesis,” William Whitman, a microbiologist at the University of Georgia who did not participate in the study, wrote in an email to The Scientist. “This work is of great value and an important development.”
Dimitry Sorokin, a microbial ecologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, and his colleagues showed previously that the sediment in soda lakes in southern Siberia contained DNA with two different versions of a gene unique to methanogens, but that were only distantly related to the same gene in known microbes. In order to find the organisms the genes belonged to, the researchers isolated 11 ...
