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Nature Geoscience
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Metabolic variability in seafloor brines revealed by carbon and sulphur dynamics

Nature Geosciencevolume 2, pages349–354 (2009)Cite this article

AnErratum to this article was published on 21 May 2009

Abstract

Brine fluids that upwell from deep, hot reservoirs below the sea bed supply the sea floor with energy-rich substrates and nutrients that are used by diverse microbial ecosystems. Contemporary hypersaline environments formed by brine seeps may provide insights into the metabolism and distribution of microorganisms on the early Earth1 or on extraterrestrial bodies2. Here we use geochemical and genetic analyses to characterize microbial community composition and metabolism in two seafloor brines in the Gulf of Mexico: an active mud volcano and a quiescent brine pool. Both brine environments are anoxic and hypersaline. However, rates of sulphate reduction and acetate production are much higher in the brine pool, whereas the mud volcano supports much higher rates of methane production. We find no evidence of anaerobic oxidation of methane, despite high methane fluxes at both sites. We conclude that the contrasting microbial community compositions and metabolisms are linked to differences in dissolved-organic-matter input from the deep subsurface and different fluid advection rates between the two sites.

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Figure 1: Schematic diagram illustrating the differences in fluid flow, stratification and surficial chemosynthetic communities between brine pools and mud volcanoes.
Figure 2: Depth profiles of microbial abundance, geochemistry, activity and energetics in the brine pool and mud volcano.
Figure 3: Phylogeny of deltaproteobacteria and epsilonproteobacteria 16S rRNA from the brine pool (GC233) and the mud volcano (GB425) sites.
Figure 4: Neighbour-joining tree of translatedmcrA sequences with 1,000 repetitions of parsimony-based bootstrap support listed for all nodes with greater than 55%.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the US National Science Foundation Life in Extreme Environments and Microbial Observatories programs; the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration National Undersea Research Program; the Department of Energy; the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund; the Environmental Protection Agency; the NASA Astrobiology Institute; and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. We thank members of the LExEn 2002 shipboard scientific party and the ship and submersible crews from Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution for help collecting and processing samples; Mitch Sogin and the Bay Paul Center at the Marine Biological Laboratory for efficient sequencing support; Basil Blake for paintingFig. 1; and A. Boetius, N. Finke and B. Gilhooly for providing comments that improved this manuscript.

Author information

Author notes

  1. Beth! N. Orcutt & Mark A. Lever

    Present address: Present addresses: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA (B.N.O.); Center for Geomicrobiology, Biology Institute, Ny Munkegade 1540 DK-0800 Århus C, Denmark (M.A.L.),

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Marine Sciences, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30602-3636, USA

    Samantha B. Joye, Vladimir A. Samarkin, Beth! N. Orcutt & Christof D. Meile

  2. Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences, Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi, Texas 78412, USA

    Ian R. MacDonald

  3. MARUM Center for Marine Environmental Sciences & Department of Geosciences, Organic Geochemistry Group, University of Bremen, 28334 Bremen, Germany

    Kai-Uwe Hinrichs & Marcus Elvert

  4. Department of Marine Sciences, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599, USA

    Andreas P. Teske, Karen G. Lloyd & Mark A. Lever

  5. School of Biology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332, USA

    Joseph P. Montoya

Authors
  1. Samantha B. Joye

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Contributions

S.B.J., V.A.S., I.R.M. and J.P.M. conceived the experiment and carried it out; K.-U.H. and M.E. completed the carbon isotopic analyses; A.P.T., K.G.L., M.A.L. and B.N.O. completed the molecular biological analyses; C.D.M. completed the thermodynamic calculations; S.B.J. wrote the paper and all authors provided editorial comments.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence toSamantha B. Joye,Beth! N. Orcutt orMark A. Lever.

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Joye, S., Samarkin, V., Orcutt, B.et al. Metabolic variability in seafloor brines revealed by carbon and sulphur dynamics.Nature Geosci2, 349–354 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo475

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