Hydrothermal chimneys host habitat-specific microbial communities
17 September 2018
New publication:Hydrothermal chimneys host habitat-specific microbial communities: analogues for studying the possible impact of mining seafloor massive sulfide deposits
Content:
Giorgio Gonnella and Stefan Kurtz of the Research group for Genome Informatics contributed to a study as joint first author and co-author, resp.
In this study, the microbial community of chimney structures of the Kairei and Pelagia hydrothermal vent fields in the
Indian Ocean are investigated. These chimneys represent an easily accessible analogue of seafloor massive deposits (SMS). The interest in mining SMS was recently growing.
The study shows that a considerable amount of the organisms in these sites have no significant 16S resemblance to known species. The chimneys also hosts rare organisms and may function as an important element of the ocean seed bank. Due to the large amount of unknown organisms, the impact of mining on the biological communities is hard to predict.
Citation: Han et al., "Hydrothermal chimneys host habitat-specific microbial communities: analogues for studying the possible impact of mining seafloor massive sulfide deposits". Scientific Reports (2018) 8:10386
Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-28613-5
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-28613-5