Thermophilic endospores associated with migrated thermogenic hydrocarbons in deep Gulf of Mexico marine sediments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dormant endospores of thermophilic bacteria (thermospores) can be detected in cold marine sediments following high-temperature incubation. Thermospores in the cold seabed may be explained by a dispersal history originating in deep biosphere oil reservoir habitats where upward migration of petroleum fluids at hydrocarbon seeps transports viable cells into the overlying ocean. We assessed this deep-to-shallow dispersal hypothesis through geochemical and microbiological analyses of 111 marine sediments from the deep water Eastern Gulf of Mexico. GC-MS and fluorescence confirmed the unambiguous presence of thermogenic hydrocarbons in 71 of these locations, indicating seepage from deeply sourced petroleum in the subsurface. Heating each sediment to 50 °C followed by 16S rRNA gene sequencing revealed several thermospores with a cosmopolitan distribution throughout the study area, as well as thermospores that were more geographically restricted. Among the thermospores having a more limited distribution, 12 OTUs from eight different lineages were repeatedly detected in sediments containing thermogenic hydrocarbons. A subset of these were significantly correlated with hydrocarbons (p < 0.05) and most closely related to Clostridiales previously detected in oil reservoirs from around the world. This provides evidence of bacteria in the ocean being dispersed out of oil reservoirs, and suggests that specific thermospores may be used as model organisms for studying warm-to-cold transmigration in the deep sea.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".