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Scientists Revive 100-Million-Year-Old Microbes Found Deep Below theBottom of the Ocean



 
 
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Old August 5th 20, 10:43 PM posted to alt.astronomy
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Default Scientists Revive 100-Million-Year-Old Microbes Found Deep Below theBottom of the Ocean

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Scientists Revive 100-Million-Year-Old Microbes Found Deep Below the
Bottom of the Ocean
TOPICS:EvolutionGeologyMicrobiologyOceanographyPop ularUniversity Of
Rhode Island
By UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND JULY 28, 2020

Magnified 101.5 Million-Year-Old Sediment Microbes
Magnified image showing microbes revived from 101.5 million-year-old
sediment. Credit: JAMSTEC

For decades, scientists have gathered ancient sediment samples from
below the seafloor to better understand past climates, plate tectonics,
and the deep marine ecosystem. In a new study published in Nature
Communications, researchers reveal that given the right food in the
right laboratory conditions, microbes collected from sediment as old as
100 million years can revive and multiply, even after laying dormant
since large dinosaurs prowled the planet.

The research team behind the new study, from the Japan Agency for
Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), the URI Graduate School
of Oceanography, the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science
and Technology, the Kochi University and Marine Works Japan, gathered
the ancient sediment samples ten years ago during an expedition to the
South Pacific Gyre, the part of the ocean with the lowest productivity
and fewest nutrients available to fuel the marine food web.

“Our main question was whether life could exist in such a
nutrient-limited environment or if this was a lifeless zone,” said the
paper’s lead author Yuki Morono, senior scientist at JAMSTEC. “And we
wanted to know how long the microbes could sustain their life in a
near-absence of food.”

On the seafloor, there are layers of sediment consisting of marine snow
(organic debris continually sourced from the sea surface), dust, and
particles carried by the wind and ocean currents. Small life forms such
as microbes become trapped in this sediment.

Morono and D'Hondt with Sediment Cores
Yuki Morono (left) and Steven D’Hondt (far right) aboard the research
drillship JOIDES Resolution with sediment cores gathered from the South
Pacific Gyre. Credit: Photo courtesy of IODP JRSO

Aboard the research drillship JOIDES Resolution, the team drilled
numerous sediment cores 100 meters below the seafloor and nearly 6,000
meters below the ocean’s surface. The scientists found that oxygen was
present in all of the cores, suggesting that if sediment accumulates
slowly on the seafloor at a rate of no more than a meter or two every
million years, oxygen will penetrate all the way from the seafloor to
the basement. Such conditions make it possible for aerobic
microorganisms–those that require oxygen to live–to survive for
geological time scales of millions of years.

With fine-tuned laboratory procedures, the scientists, led by Morono,
incubated the samples to coax their microbes to grow. The results
demonstrated that rather than being fossilized remains of life, the
microbes in the sediment had survived, and were capable of growing and
dividing.

“We knew that there was life in deep sediment near the continents where
there’s a lot of buried organic matter,” said URI Graduate School of
Oceanography professor and co-author of the study Steven D’Hondt. “But
what we found was that life extends in the deep ocean from the seafloor
all the way to the underlying rocky basement.”

Morono was initially taken aback by the results. “At first I was
skeptical, but we found that up to 99.1% of the microbes in sediment
deposited 101.5 million years ago were still alive and were ready to
eat,” he said.

With the newly developed ability to grow, manipulate and characterize
ancient microorganisms, the research team is looking forward to applying
a similar approach to other questions about the geological past.
According to Morono, life for microbes in the subseafloor is very slow
compared to life above it, and so the evolutionary speed of these
microbes will be slower. “We want to understand how or if these ancient
microbes evolved,” he said. “This study shows that the subseafloor is an
excellent location to explore the limits of life on Earth.”

Before looking ahead to future research, D’Hondt took time to reflect on
Morono’s achievement. “What’s most exciting about this study is that it
shows that there are no limits to life in the old sediment of the
world’s ocean,” said D’Hondt. “In the oldest sediment we’ve drilled,
with the least amount of food, there are still living organisms, and
they can wake up, grow and multiply.”

Reference: “Aerobic microbial life persists in oxic marine sediment as
old as 101.5 million years” by Yuki Morono, Motoo Ito, Tatsuhiko
Hoshino, Takeshi Terada, Tomoyuki Hori, Minoru Ikehara, Steven D’Hondt
and Fumio Inagaki, 28 July 2020, Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-17330-1

This study was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of
Science (JSPS), the Funding Program for Next Generation World-Leading
Researchers, and the U.S. National Science Foundation. This study was
conducted using core samples collected during Expedition 329, “South
Pacific Gyre Subseafloor Life,” of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program.


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