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Published April 29, 2015 | Supplemental Material + Published
Journal Article Open

Insights from the Metagenome of an Acid Salt Lake: The Role of Biology in an Extreme Depositional Environment

Abstract

The extremely acidic brine lakes of the Yilgarn Craton of Western Australia are home to some of the most biologically challenging waters on Earth. In this study, we employed metagenomic shotgun sequencing to generate a microbial profile of the depositional environment associated with the sulfur-rich sediments of one such lake. Of the 1.5 M high-quality reads generated, 0.25 M were mapped to protein features, which in turn provide new insights into the metabolic function of this community. In particular, 45 diverse genes associated with sulfur metabolism were identified, the majority of which were linked to either the conversion of sulfate to adenylylsulfate and the subsequent production of sulfide from sulfite or the oxidation of sulfide, elemental sulfur, and thiosulfate via the sulfur oxidation (Sox) system. This is the first metagenomic study of an acidic, hypersaline depositional environment, and we present evidence for a surprisingly high level of microbial diversity. Our findings also illuminate the possibility that we may be meaningfully underestimating the effects of biology on the chemistry of these sulfur-rich sediments, thereby influencing our understanding of past geobiological conditions that may have been present on Earth as well as early Mars.

Additional Information

© 2015 Johnson et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Received: September 12, 2014; Accepted: February 24, 2015; Published: April 29, 2015. Funding: This research was supported by a William F. Milton Fund grant to SSJ (http://www.faculty.harvard.edu/scholarship-and-research/grantsenabling- research/william-f-milton-fund). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Acknowledgments: The authors would like to thank Melanie Mormile, Erez Aiden, Maya Bhatia, and Jeffrey Marlow for insightful comments on the manuscript, Elena Stamenova for skillful assistance in the laboratory, and the Geological Survey of Western Australia for generous support in acquiring samples. Author Contributions: Conceived and designed the experiments: SSJ. Performed the experiments: SSJ BLE. Analyzed the data: SSJ MGC BLE. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: SSJ MGC BLE KCB. Wrote the paper: SSJ MGC BLE KCB. Data Availability: The sequences are publicly available on the NCBI server under project ID PRJNA260488. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

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