Microbial diversity of oligotrophic marine sediments

Public Deposited
Analytics

Downloadable Content

Download PDF
Request Version for Screen Reader
Last Modified
  • March 21, 2019
Creator
  • Durbin, Alan
    • Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Marine Sciences
Abstract
  • Oligotrophic marine sediments cover nearly 90% of the ocean's floor, yet in contrast to the continental margins, their biogeochemistry and microbiology has been little explored. Oligotrophic sediments exhibit dramatic nutrient limitation due to the slow rain rate of photosynthetic carbon, and consequently display a greatly expanded zone of higher-energy electron accepting activities relative to margin sediments. The working hypothesis that the most-energetic available electron acceptor structures subsurface microbial communities predicts that different microbial lineages occur in oligotrophic vs. organic-rich margin sediments. This study examines this hypothesis by considering the archaeal diversity, as revealed in clone libraries, for an ultraoligotrophic, fully oxic site, as well as the archaeal and bacterial diversity of an oligotrophic, oxic/suboxic site. Finally, I compare the archaeal diversity of available oligotrophic and representative continental margin sites, and find evidence for oligotrophic sediments as hosting a distinct, deeply divergent assemblage of Archaea, possibly adapted to exploit the higher-energy electron acceptors present therein.
Date of publication
DOI
Resource type
Rights statement
  • In Copyright
Advisor
  • Teske, Andreas
Degree granting institution
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Language
Access right
  • Open access
Date uploaded
  • October 11, 2010

Relations

Parents:

This work has no parents.

Items

Thumbnail Title Date Uploaded Visibility Actions
file details Microbial diversity of oligotrophic marine sediments 2019-04-10 Public Download