Science, Space and Technology News 2024
Scientists have developed a groundbreaking method to link genetics with the activity of anaerobic microbes, revealing key insights into microbial communities deep below Earth’s surface. This approach, showcasing a dominant bacterium in Death Valley’s aquifer, opens new avenues for understanding microbial roles in global processes.
The Desert Research Institute team extracting samples from the bore hole at Death Valley. Credit: Duane Moser, Desert Research Institute Once the active cells were measured and isolated, the team sequenced their individual genomes. The researchers also used meta-transcriptomics, a method for determining which genes are being actively expressed, and radioisotope tracers, a more traditional method for measuring activity within a microbial community. This was done both to “double check” their results and to get even more information on the links between what these microbes are genetically capable of and what they’re actually doing.
This new study builds on the first demonstration of this approach for quantifying the activity of individual cells. In late 2022, the teamon microbes in seawater, showing that a small fraction of microorganisms is responsible for consuming most of the oxygen in the ocean. With this new paper, the team is expanding that method to show it can be used in low biomass environments with microbes that don’t rely on oxygen.
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