The researchers successfully restored the microbes in a state of suspended animation in a barren area of seabed for over 100 million years.
A team of scientists from Japan and America was looking for microscopic life in less than hospitable conditions under the seabed of the Pacific ocean.
“We wanted to know how long germs can maintain its life in the almost complete lack of food,” said microbiologist Moreno of Yuki from the Japanese Agency for science and technology.
They received the answer: microbes that have been trapped in sediments deposited 100 million years ago, you can recover with the right nutrient medium and a small amount of added oxygen.
When life gets trapped in other environments with high pressure, fossils are usually formed within a million years or more, but these microbes were in a state of suspended animation.
“We knew there was life in the deep sediments near the continents, where a lot of buried organic matter,” said a colleague of Moreno, geomicrobiology Steven D Hondt from the University of Rhode island. “But we found that life extends into the deep ocean from the sea floor to the rocky Foundation.”
During the expedition, aboard the drilling ship JOIDES Resolution, the team extracted cores of sediment, which extends 75 meters below the sea floor, which is almost 6 kilometers below the ocean surface.
They took samples of ancient pelagic clay, which accumulates in the deepest and most remote parts of the ocean, and much younger Cretaceous nannofossils sludge age from 4.3 to 13 million years.
They found kislorodopronitsaemaya germs (and dissolved oxygen) in each layer of the core, from top to bottom and at each site, selected scientists.
On Board the ship samples were taken from sedimentary cores to see preserved, whether microbes, lacking energy, your “metabolic potential” and if they can feed and multiply.
Ancient microbes were given the charge of the oxygen and fed with substrates containing carbon and nitrogen. Even in the oldest samples of precipitation, the researchers were able to recover up to 99 percent of the original microbial community.
After prolonged incubation of the microbial community was sorted by genes. The researchers reported that the soil of the seabed is dominated by bacteria, but not the type that produces spores, which means they were ready to grow as soon as they were given the right food.
The microbial population increased four times and consumption of carbon and nitrogen after 68 days of incubation.
“This shows that there are no restrictions to life in the old lees of the world’s oceans,” said D Hondt. “In the old draft, which we drilled, with the least amount ��look, there are still living organisms, and they can Wake up to grow and multiply”.
The study is published in Nature Communications.
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