Nature publishes new evidence about the deep biosphere written by biogeoscientists

... 10 centimeters of the seafloor. Below this level archaea appear to take over the major fraction of the biomass pool." According to Lipp, archaea make up at least 87 percent of organisms that colonize the deep biosphere. "These subsurface archaea can be viewed as starvelings," he continues. ...

Paired microbes eliminate methane using sulfur pathway

... this case, the microbial consortia consist of an archaea a single cell organism that consumes methane ... House, associate professor of geosciences. "The archaea take in the methane and produce a methyl sulfide, ... carbon monoxide for methane and found that the archaea could oxidize that as well and produce these ...

Symposium marks 30th anniversary of discovery of third domain of life

... Before Our Eyes: 30 Years of Molecular Phylogeny, archaea and Evolution will detail the exacting work that ... Carl Woese led the team that identified the archaea as a unique domain of life, distinct from ... believed that the microbes now called archaea were simply another taxon among bacteria. They ...

Ancient organisms discovered in Canadian gold mine

... domains of life -- eukaryotes, bacteria, and archaea -- branched off and went their separate ways ... shale samples, loaded with oily lipid remains of archaea found in a deep Canadian gold mine near Timmins, ... made of archaea-derived lipids." The archaea lived in water and sediments when the region was ...

Deep sea methane scavengers captured

... Earth's biomass. Yet, we have little idea what most of these bacteria and archaea are doing. It is not only their small size that makes them hard to study. ... genes for N2 fixation and demonstrated in lab experiments that the AOM archaea are indeed fixing N2. These results are intriguing, especially since the ...

Researchers probe a DNA repair enzyme

... pigmentosum. The researchers studied the archaeal version of Rad3. archaea are microbes whose DNA repair systems are closely related to those of ... domain stabilized by an iron-sulfur cluster, Spies said. Working with archaea has the advantage of allowing the researchers to increase the amount ...

Census of protein architectures offers new view of history of life

... architectures that would one day belong to the superkingdom known as the archaea was the first to lose a fold. That fold, a huge class of protein fold ... adds to the picture of how the superkingdoms emerged and diverged. The archaea jettisoned many of the folds that had been part of their original ....

Exploring standards to advance microbial genomics

... applauds the effort to coordinate balanced sampling of the Tree of Life recently launched through GEBA: the Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and archaea ( http://www.jgi.doe.gov/programs/GEBA/index.html ). He also sees a way forward using single-cell genomics ⎯ a technique now being pursued in ...

Methane-eating microbes can use iron and manganese oxides to 'breathe'

... living in the sediments she used, she does not know which of these microbes is responsible for consuming methane. It might be one bacteria or archaea species, or it may be a consortium of microbes. She is trying to identify the organisms responsible. ...

Rampant helper syndrome

... The archaea are single-celled organisms and a domain unto themselves, quite apart from the so called eukaryotes, being bacteria and higher organisms. Many ...

Proteins strangle cell during division

... into the processes involving ESCRT proteins, such as HIV particle release. Evolution Some theories suggest that in evolutionary terms the archaea are the predecessors of eukaryotes. This is confirmed by the fact that genes involved in cell division in Sulfolobus acidocaldarius are related to ...

New life beneath sea and ice

... microbial communities. Together with other international partners, Yakimov's team has already identified more than ten new lineages of bacteria and archaea (these are ancient bacteria-like organisms), which they have named the Mediterranean Sea Brine Lake Divisions. There is ample life at the boundary ...

New cell division mechanism discovered

... virus budding, including HIV, from the cell surface. The results are, thus, important not only for an increased understanding of the cell biology of archaea and extremophiles, but also for key cellular processes in human and other higher organisms, and for issues related to the origin and evolutionary ...

Novel publishing approach puts textbook in more hands

... on vertebrate glycobiology, the second edition reflects the fact that glycosylation is universal, that all cells in all speciesfrom eubacteria and archaea to arthropods and vertebratesare coated (both inside and out) with a dense array of various sugar molecules. The roles of glycans in human ...

The structure of the Mre11 protein bound to DNA

... residues. P. furiosus Mre11 has six recognition loops. Mre11 from eukaryotes organisms including yeast, frogs, and humans, whose cells, unlike archaea and bacteria, have membrane-packaged nuclei exhibit only five of these recognition loops but are otherwise similar. How Mre11 works The ...

American Society for Microbiology honors Edward F. DeLong

... to address environmental microbiological questions. One of Dr. DeLong's most important contributions is the breakthrough discovery that marine archaea are among the most abundant organisms in the deep ocean, while his work in sediment microbiology led to his identification of dystrophic associations ...

US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute announces new genome sequencing projects

... Desulfurococcus species will resolve the finer details that distinguish proton reduction (producing hydrogen) from sulfur reduction in fermentative archaea and help to define the evolutionary and metabolic relationships of the Desulfurococcus species with their archaeal relatives. The project's ...

July 2008 GEOLOGY and GSA Today media highlights

... process that is still dominant at modern marine seeps. Birgel et al. show that the anaerobic oxidation of methane was performed by methanotrophic archaea and associated sulfate-reducing bacteria. Birgel et al.'s finding extends the record of a major biogeochemical process by approximately 150 million ...

Manufactured Buckyballs don't harm microbes that clean the environment

... of many types of nanomaterials in different environments." Nyberg analyzed microbes in each of three domains of a genetic tree - bacteria, archaea and eukarya - all including microorganisms that play a part in breaking down organic matter. Previously, researchers doing environmental risk ...

Elevated carbon dioxide changes soil microbe mix below plants

... by CO 2 makes the plants less hospitable/susceptible to the fungi. a significant decrease in nitrate-reducers of the domain bacteria and archaea potentially implicated in ammonium oxidation. The increased plant growth associated with elevated CO 2 environments has often been observed to ...

BGSU undergraduates to pilot groundbreaking genome project

... and cleanup. They have an ambitious plan, Xu explained, noting that the JGI hopes to sequence the genomes of all cultured bacteria and archaea in the next few years. With more than 5,000 genomes, averaging 4 to 5 million base pairs each, they need the input of a big community, including our ...

Methane from microbes: a fuel for the future

... and use up carbon dioxide in the process, suggested Dr James Chong at a Science Media Centre press briefing today. Methanogens are microbes called archaea that are similar to bacteria. They are responsible for the vast majority of methane produced on earth by living things says Dr Chong from York ...

Hydrothermal vents: Hot spots of microbial diversity

... vents on the Pacific deep-sea volcano, Axial Seamount. The researchers discovered that while there may be as few as 3,000 different kinds of archaea at these sites, the bacteria exceed 37,000 different kinds. Most of these bacteria had never been reported before, and hundreds were so different ...

From hot springs to rice farms, scientists reveal new insights into the secret lives of archaea

... to shake the label ''extremist.'' So it is with archaea (ar-KEY-uh), a collection of bacteria-like ... things. For years, biologists have pigeonholed archaea as extremophiles-creatures that live in extreme conditions. Indeed, many species of archaea thrive in environments that would kill other ...

Microbe fixes nitrogen at a blistering 92 C

... before the three main branches of life ?bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes ?diverged some 3.5 billion years ... theory that the nitrogenase system arose within archaea and was later transferred laterally to bacteria. ... lots of evidence that point to high-temperature archaea as the first life on Earth but the question has ...

Ammonia-loving archaea win landslide majority

... Schleper, full professor of Molecular biology of archaea at University Bergen, Norway. The discovery ... measured the quantities of active bacteria and archaea in the complex mixtures of soil organisms. The ... in today's (Aug. 17) issue of Nature. archaea are single-celled microbes that, along with ...

Novel protein complex enables survival in hostile environment

... of the bacteria and energy transducers of certain archaea or if this enzyme originated from a gene fusion ... the loss of certain key genes gave rise to the archaea that reduces sulfate, but do not make methane. ... of methane with sulfate, a process in which archaea closely related to ...

Life in deadly conditions

... to other salt-tolerant organisms, halophile archaea have an extremely high salt concentration inside ... building blocks in the proteomes of halophile archaea make it possible for the proteins to remain ... that "the comparison with other halophile archaea we have studied shows that these organisms have a ...

Marine bacterium suspected to play role in global carbon and nitrogen cycles

... carbon. Researchers have discovered the first archaea known to oxidize ammonia for energy and ... molecular experiments led us to suspect that archaea could be involved in the marine nitrogen cycle. ... animal intestines and the human mouth. archaea have primarily been associated with extreme ...

Gut microbes' partnership helps body extract energy from food, store it as fat

... identified in the 1970s and mistaken for a primitive form of bacteria, archaea initially became famous because of their ability to live in extreme ... nothing else could survive, such as hot springs. Scientists first isolated archaea from the human intestine in 1982, and have recently recognized M. smithii ...

A salty tale: New bacterial genome sequenced from ancient salterns

... in Alicante and Mallorca, Spain. Although extreme-loving microbes called archaea were known to eke out life in the ponds, scientists were surprised to ... recognized this biochemical adaptation: it's the same one used by archaea also living in the salterns. That wasn't the only similarity. ...

Researchers find missing genes of ancient organism

... Nanoarchaeum equitans, is a member of a new phylogenetic kingdom in the archaea containing organisms that are primitive, parasitic and extremophile, or ... "These results may point to extremophiles in the kingdom of archaea as predecessors of more modern organisms that have gained a genetic load ...

Study of protein folds offers insight into metabolic evolution

... folds are quite ancient: These architectures were found to be quite common in all the species of bacteria, animals, plants, fungi, protists and archaea the researchers analyzed. Of 776 metabolic protein folds surveyed, 16 were found to be omnipresent, and nine of those occurred in the earliest ...

Latest advances in DNA sequencing highlighted at DOE Joint Genome Institute User Meeting

... Low-Cost, Effective, Anti-Malarial Drugs Jay Keasling, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory A Genomic Encyclopedia for Bacteria and archaea Jonathan Eisen, University of California, Davis Explorations of the Human Microbiome David Relman, Stanford ...

Molecular DNA switch found to be the same for all life

... Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly. Taken with earlier research that identified AAA+ proteins at the heart of the DNA replication initiator in archaea organisms, these new findings indicate that DNA replication is an ancient event that evolved millions of years ago, prior to when Archaea, Bacteria ...

Microbes under Greenland Ice may be preview of what scientists find under Mars' surface

... bacterial life on Mars. Methane is a greenhouse gas present in the atmospheres of both Earth and Mars. If a class of ancient microbes called archaea are the source of Mars' methane, as some scientists have proposed, then unmanned probes to the Martian surface should look for them at depths where ...

New book expands biological classifications to account for 'alien' life

... now there hasn't been any place to put RNA life." In the current popular classification system the highest levels are three domains ?bacteria, archaea and eukarya, the last of which includes all animals. Ward's plan places those three domains within a larger dominion, which he calls "terroan" to ...

The secret to longevity in tubeworms

... of sulfide-producing microbes, and ensures its own long-term survival. The sulfide this worm needs is created by a consortium of bacteria and archaea that live in the deep sea cold sediments surrounding the seep where the worm lives. These chemoautotrophs use energy from hydrocarbons to reduce ...