Publikationsdatum:
2022-05-25
Beschreibung:
Author Posting. © National Academy of Sciences, 2006. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of National Academy of Sciences for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103 (2006): 12317-12322, doi:10.1073/pnas.0600756103.
Beschreibung:
Marine Crenarchaeota are the most abundant single group of prokaryotes in the ocean but their physiology and role in marine biogeochemical cycles are unknown. Recently, a member of this clade was isolated from a sea aquarium and shown to be capable of nitrification, tentatively suggesting that they may play a role in the oceanic nitrogen cycle. We enriched a crenarchaeote from North Sea water and show that it oxidizes ammonium to nitrite. A time series study in the North Sea revealed that the abundance of the gene encoding for the archaeal ammonia monooxygenase alfa subunit (amoA) is correlated with the decline in ammonium concentrations and with the abundance of Crenarcheota. Remarkably, the archaeal amoA abundance was 1-2 orders of magnitude higher than those of bacterial nitrifiers which are commonly thought to mediate the oxidation of ammonium to nitrite in marine environments. Analysis of Atlantic waters of the upper 1000 m, where most of the ammonium regeneration and oxidation takes place, showed that crenarchaeotal amoA copy numbers are also one to three orders of magnitude higher than those of bacterial amoA. Our data thus suggest a major role for Archaea in oceanic nitrification.
Beschreibung:
This study was partially supported by grants to JSSD and MJLC (VENI) from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).
Repository-Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Materialart:
Preprint
Format:
application/pdf
