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Ecophysiology of Thermophilic Bacterial Endospores in Deep Marine Sediments
Department: Biology
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Paper000
Specimen Elements
Pocatello
Unknown to Unknown
Soni Thapa
Idaho State University
Thesis
No
6/25/2025
digital
City: Pocatello
Master
Endospore-forming thermophilic bacteria (thermospores) have been repeatedly detected in permanently cold marine environments that do not favor their metabolic activity. Thermospores in the cold seabed may be explained by a dispersal history originating in warm subsurface habitats like oil reservoirs, where the natural seepage of fluids transports viable cells from oil reservoirs into the overlying ocean. Previously, incubation experiments heating hydrocarbon seep sediments from the Eastern Gulf of Mexico at 50 °C successfully identified several seep-associated thermospore lineages dispersed from high-temperature petroleum reservoirs. In our study, we investigated the activity and diversity of thermospores in deep sea sediments from GoM locations subjected to different seepage conditions, including hydrocarbons, brine, both hydrocarbon and brine, as well as non-seep sites using multiple high-temperature anoxic incubation experiments at 35 °C, 50 °C, and 65 °C followed by 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing. Our findings showed that some bacterial classes and genera were restricted to particular temperatures and location types; for instance, Desulfitobacteriia was observed only at 35 °C and only in hydrocarbon seep sediments. Moreover, more diverse bacterial classes and genera were observed in hydrocarbon seep locations compared to brine and non-seeps. This provided evidence that these bacterial taxa are exclusive to particular incubation temperatures and site types, emphasizing the importance of incubation experiments and comparative study of different locations at multiple temperatures covering a wide thermophilic range for the discovery of novel microbes that were not detected before in that location at 50 °C. Keywords: Diversity, hydrocarbon, incubation, temperature, thermospore

Ecophysiology of Thermophilic Bacterial Endospores in Deep Marine Sediments

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