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Anaerobic Methane-Oxidizing Microbial Community in a Coastal Marine Sediment: Anaerobic Methanotrophy Dominated by ANME-3

  • Environmental Microbiology
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Abstract

The microbial community inhabiting the shallow sulfate-methane transition zone in coastal sediments from marine Lake Grevelingen (The Netherlands) was characterized, and the ability of the microorganisms to carry out anaerobic oxidation of methane coupled to sulfate reduction was assessed in activity tests. In vitro activity tests of the sediment with methane and sulfate demonstrated sulfide production coupled to the simultaneous consumption of sulfate and methane at approximately equimolar ratios over a period of 150 days. The maximum sulfate reduction rate was 5 μmol sulfate per gram dry weight per day during the incubation period. Diverse archaeal and bacterial clades were retrieved from the sediment with the majority of them clustered with Euryarchaeota, Thaumarcheota, Bacteroidetes, and Proteobacteria. The 16S rRNA gene sequence analysis showed that the sediment from marine Lake Grevelingen contained anaerobic methanotrophic Archaea (ANME) and methanogens as archaeal clades with a role in the methane cycling. ANME at the studied site mainly belong to the ANME-3 clade. This study provides one of the few reports for the presence of ANME-3 in a shallow coastal sediment. Sulfate-reducing bacteria from Desulfobulbus clades were found among the sulfate reducers, however, with very low relative abundance. Desulfobulbus has previously been commonly found associated with ANME, whereas in our study, ANME-3 and Desulfobulbus were not observed simultaneously in clusters, suggesting the possibility of independent AOM by ANME-3.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge Filip Meysman from the Royal Netherlands Institute of Sea Research (NIOZ, Yerseke, The Netherlands) for providing the Lake Grevelingen sediment, Fatimah Sulu-Gambari and Mathilde Hagens (Utrecht University, The Netherlands) for the location map and Jack van de Vossenberg (UNESCO-IHE, The Netherlands) for help in FISH analysis. This research was funded by the Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate Program ETeCoS3 (Environmental Technologies for Contaminated Solids, Soils and Sediments, grant agreement FPA no. 2010-0009). G. Gonzalez-Gil acknowledges funding by a Marie Curie Intra European Fellowship (SUREANMetOX-300078) within the 7th European Community Framework Programme. M. Egger and C. P. Slomp acknowledge funding by the European Research Council under the European Community’s Seventh Framework Program (ERC Starting Grant #278364 to C.P. Slomp) and The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO Vici grant 865.13.005 to C. P. Slomp). Y. Zhang acknowledges the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number: 41476123).

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  1. Matthias Egger

    Present address: Center for Geomicrobiology, Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, Ny Munkegade 114, 8000, Aarhus, Denmark

Authors and Affiliations

  1. UNESCO-IHE, Westvest-7, P.O. Box 3015, Delft, 2601, DA, The Netherlands

    Susma Bhattarai, Chiara Cassarini, Graciela Gonzalez-Gil & Piet N. L. Lens

  2. Department of Earth Sciences - Geochemistry, Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University, P.O. Box 80021, 3508 TA, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Matthias Egger & Caroline P. Slomp

  3. State Key Laboratory of Ocean Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Dongchuan Rd. 800, Shanghai, 200240, People’s Republic of China

    Yu Zhang

  4. Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering, University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, via Di Biasio 43, 03043, Cassino, FR, Italy

    Giovanni Esposito

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Bhattarai, S., Cassarini, C., Gonzalez-Gil, G. et al. Anaerobic Methane-Oxidizing Microbial Community in a Coastal Marine Sediment: Anaerobic Methanotrophy Dominated by ANME-3. Microb Ecol 74, 608–622 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-017-0978-y

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