Radiolytic support for oxidative metabolism in an ancient subsurface brine system.

ABSTRACT: Long-isolated subsurface brine environments (Ma-Ga residence times) may be habitable if they sustainably provide substrates, e.g. through water-rock reactions, that support microbial catabolic energy yields exceeding maintenance costs. The relative inaccessibility and low biomass of such systems has led to limited understanding of microbial taxonomic distribution, metabolism, and survival under abiotic stress exposure in these extreme environments. In this study, taxonomic and metabolic annotations of 95 single-cell amplified genomes were obtained for one low biomass (10³-10⁴ cells/ml), hypersaline (246 g/L), and radiolytically enriched brine obtained from 3.1 km depth in South Africa's Moab Khotsong mine. The majority of single-cell amplified genomes belonged to thre

SUBMITTER: Nisson DM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11630799 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature