Project description:Sulfate-reducing bacteria (SRB) are ubiquitously distributed across various biospheres and play key roles in global sulfur and carbon cycles. However, few deep-sea SRB have been cultivated and studied in situ, limiting our understanding of the true metabolism of SRB in the deep biosphere. Here, we firstly clarified the high abundance of SRB in deep-sea sediments via the operational taxonomic units (OTU) sequencing analysis. We have successfully isolated a sulfate-reducing bacterium (strain zrk46) from a cold seep sediment, by using an enriched medium supplemented with sulfate. Our genomic, physiological and phylogenetic analyses indicate that strain zrk46 is a novel species, which we propose be named: Pseudodesulfovibrio serpens. Based on the combined results from growth assays and proteomic analyses, we found that supplementation with sulfate (SO42-), thiosulfate (S2O32-), or sulfite (SO32-) promoted the growth of strain zrk46 by facilitating energy production through the dissimilatory sulfate reduction with the auxiliary functions of heterodisulfide reductases, ferredoxins, and nitrate reduction associated proteins, which were coupled to the oxidation of environmental organic matter in both laboratory and deep-sea in situ conditions. Moreover, metatranscriptomic results have also confirmed the dissimilatory sulfate reduction of deep-sea SRB in in situ environment, which might be coupled to the methane oxidation of anaerobic methanotrophic archaea (ANME-2). Overall, these findings expand our understanding of deep-sea SRB, while highlighting their importance for deep-sea sulfur and carbon cycles.
Project description:Sulfur metabolism in the deep-sea cold seep has been mentioned to have an important contribution to the biogeochemical cycle of sulfur in previous studies. And sulfate reducing bacteria have also been considered to be a dominant microbial population in the deep-sea cold seep and play a crucial role in this process. However, most of sulfate reducing bacteria from cold seep still cannot be purely cultured under laboratory conditions, therefore the actual sulfur metabolism pathways in sulfate reducing bacteria from the deep-sea cold seep have remained unclear. Here, we isolate and pure culture a typical sulfate reducing bacterium Desulfovibrio marinus CS1 from the sediment sample of the deep-sea cold seep in the South China Sea, which provides a probability to understand the sulfur metabolism in the cold seep.
Project description:16s RNA gene sequencing data from seawater, bed sediment and steel corrosion samples from Shoreham Harbour, UK, collected to allow bacterial species comparisons between microbially influenced corrosion, the surrounding seawater, and the sea bed sediment at the seafloor and 50cm depth below seafloor.