Iron-Fueled Life in the Continental Subsurface: Deep Mine Microbial Observatory, South Dakota, USA.

ABSTRACT: Iron-bearing minerals are key components of the Earth's crust and potentially critical energy sources for subsurface microbial life. The Deep Mine Microbial Observatory (DeMMO) is situated in a range of iron-rich lithologies, and fracture fluids here reach concentrations as high as 8.84 mg/liter. Iron cycling is likely an important process, given the high concentrations of iron in fracture fluids and detection of putative iron-cycling taxa via marker gene surveys. However, a previous metagenomic survey detected no iron cycling potential at two DeMMO localities. Here, we revisited the potential for iron cycling at DeMMO using a new metagenomic data set including all DeMMO sites and FeGenie, a new annotation pipeline that is optimized for the detection of iron cycling genes. We annotated fun

SUBMITTER: Casar CP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8478452 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature