Thousands of new kinds of marine microbes have been discovered at two deep-sea hydrothermal vents off the Oregon coast by U.S. scientists, the journal Science reported Thursday.
Using a new analytical technique called "454 tag sequencing," scientists from the Marine Biological Laboratory and the University of Washington surveyed one million DNA sequences of bacteria and archaea, two of the three major domains of life.
The DNA was taken from samples collected from two 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 known microbes that we could only identify them to the level of phylum," says lead author, Julie Huber of the MBL. "Clearly, additional sampling of these communities will be necessary to determine the true diversity."
"Even with tag sequencing, statistical tests of our data suggest we still only sampled about half of the total number of species that were actually present," says MBL scientist David Mark Welch.
With the tag sequencing tool, the research also revealed that the microbial population structures differed between vent sites due to their different geochemical environments.
This research is part of the ongoing International Census of Marine Microbes, a massive effort to inventory the world's marine microbial diversity.
Source: Xinhua
|
Comment
Tell A Friend
Print Format
Save Article