Assessing anaerobic activity in perennial subzero hypersaline spring of the high Arctic: focus on methanogenesis, anaerobic oxidation of methane and sulphur reduction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Lost Hammer (LH) spring in the Canadian high Arctic perennially discharges subzero (-5°C) hypersaline (24% salt) brines through thick layers of permafrost (> 500 m), and so far accounts for the only described terrestrial methane seep in frozen settings on Earth. The present thesis aimed to ascertain that actively metabolising, indigenous, microbial communities do populate the sediments of the LH spring outlet despite the extreme conditions in situ. Incubation experiments with LH sediments could not confirm that microbial consortia undergo anaerobic methane metabolism but revealed that the reduction of sulphur compounds (SR) with hydrogen, most likely hydrogenotrophic sulphate reduction, was potentially carried out by some cryophilic populations under combined hypersaline and subzero (down to -20°C) conditions. Unusual H2S releases from LH sediments were also detected at high temperatures (80°C); the biogenicity of these releases could however not be confirmed and could alternatively reflect abiotic processes. Pyrosequencing analyses of both 16S rRNA (i.e. cDNA) and 16S rRNA genes (i.e. DNA) on 30 cm layers of LH sediments retrieved in April 2012 and July 2012 indicated fairly stable bacterial and archaeal communities at the phylum level, but a greater bacterial diversity at the species level (> 97% sequence similarities). The composition of the LH communities however differed significantly from previous surveys of the site, either reflecting site's heterogeneity and/or differences in sequencing coverage. Potentially active bacterial and archaeal communities were respectively dominated by clades related to the T78 Chloroflexi group and Halobacteria species, as indicated by 16S rRNA results; no sequence related to ANME-1 archaea were detected unlike in previous investigations of the site. The present study indicated that SR, hydrogenotrophy (possibly coupled to autotrophy), and hydrocarbon degradation (other than methane), most likely account for important metabolic processes carried out by LH microbial communities. Overall, the obtained findings provided additional evidence that the LH system host active communities of anaerobic, halophilic, and cryophilic microorganisms despite the extreme conditions in situ.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".