High-Throughput Sequencing Reveals a Potentially Novel Sulfurovum Species Dominating the Microbial Communities of the Seawater-Sediment Interface of a Deep-Sea Cold Seep in South China Sea.

In the Formosa cold seep of the South China Sea (SCS), large amounts of methane and sulfide hydrogen are released from the subseafloor. In this study, we systematically investigated the microbial communities in the seawater-sediment interface of Formosa cold seep using high-throughput sequencing techniques including amplicon sequencing based on next-generation sequencing and Pacbio amplicon sequencing platforms, and metagenomics. We found that Sulfurovum dominated the microbial communities in the sediment-seawater interface, including the seawater close to the seepage, the surface sediments, and the gills of the dominant animal inhabitant (Shinkaia crosnieri). A nearly complete 16S rRNA gene sequence of the dominant operational taxonomic units (OTUs) was obtained from the Pacbio sequencing platforms and classified as OTU-L1, which belonged to Sulfurovum. This OTU was potentially novel as it shared relatively low similarity percentages (<97%) of the gene sequence with its close phylogenetic species. Further, a draft genome of Sulfurovum was assembled using the binning technique based on metagenomic data. Genome analysis suggested that Sulfurovum sp. in this region may fix carbon by the reductive tricarboxylic acid (rTCA) pathway, obtain energy by oxidizing reduced sulfur through sulfur oxidizing (Sox) pathway, and utilize nitrate as electron acceptors. These results demonstrated that Sulfurovum probably plays an important role in the carbon, sulfur, and nitrogen cycles of the Formosa cold seep of the SCS. This study improves our understanding of the diversity, distribution, and function of sulfur-oxidizing bacteria in deep-sea cold seep.

Discovery of supercritical carbon dioxide in a hydrothermal system.

Supercritical CO2 appearing as bubbles in hydrothermal vents was identified in the south part of the Okinawa Trough using in situ Raman spectroscopy. Significantly, the N2 peak in supercritical CO2 is much larger than those in seawater and vent fluids, indicating that supercritical CO2 enriches N2 from the surrounding environment. Considering that the partial pressures of CO2 and N2 in the Earth's proto-atmosphere were ~10-20 MPa, supercritical CO2 with high N2 was likely the dominant CO2 phase near the water-air interface in the early history of the Earth, which promoted the synthesis, pre-enrichment and preservation of amino acids and other organic matters that are essential to the origin of life.

[Automatic Recognition of Overlapped Spectral Peaks by Combined Symmetric Zero-Area Conversion and L-M Fitting].

The peaks' overlapping often exists in Raman spectroscopy analysis, because of the low spectral resolution of the spectrograph and the complex sample components. The overlapped peaks lead to the errors in peak parameters extraction easily, and at last lead to the analysis error of sample components, which increases the difficulty in automatic analysis of field spectra. The identification of overlapped peaks is the key difficulty of in-situ spectra analysis. To solve this problem, an automatic method of identifying the overlapped peaks was established basing on an analysis model with multiple Gaussian shape peaks. The peak number and the initial parameters(the peak position, peak height, and width) were obtained by symmetric zero-area transformation firstly, and then the parameters were optimized by Levenberg-Marquardt fitting method eventually. Some algorithm experiments were executed to test the method respectively by simulated data and Raman spectra data, and the former showed that the symmetric zero-area transformation method can extract the initial peak parameters with high accuracy, and then converges fast, and is adaptive to signal with wide dynamic range of SNR, but has false and omissive peaks to low SNR signal. The research results show that the automatic method of identifying the overlapped peaks with symmetric zero-area transformation combined with L-M fitting has a certain practical value.

[Research on the Quantitative Analysis for In-Situ Detection of Acid Radical Ions Using Laser Raman Spectroscopy].

Laser Raman spectroscopy as an in situ analytical technology can enable detailed investigation of the ocean environment. It is necessary to set up a quantitative analysis method based on laser Raman spectroscopy to understand the marine status in situ. In the laboratory investigations, varied concentration of HCO3(-), SO4(2-) and coastal waters of Qingdao are taken as the samples, operating 532 nm of laser, using fiber optic probes to simulate detection mode in situ. Raman spectra are analyzed using the method of internal standard normalization, multiple linear regression (MLR), general Partial Least Squares (PLS) and PLS based on dominant factor respectively in data processing. It was found that correlation coefficients of calibration curves are not high in internal standard normalization method and predicted relative errors on the prepared samples are much high, so internal standard normalization method cannot be effectively used in the quantitative analysis of HCO3(-), SO4(2-) in the water. And with the multiple linear regression, the analysis accuracy was improved effectively. The calibration curve of PLS based on dominant factor showed that the SO4(2-) and HCO3(-) of pre-made solution with correlation coefficient R2 of 0.990 and 0.916 respectively. The 30 mmol · L(-1) of SO4(2-) and 20 mmol · L(-1) of HCO3(-) in two target samples were determined with the relative errors lower than 3.262% and 5.267% respectively. SO4(2-) in the coastal waters as the research object was analyzed by above-mentioned methods, comparing with 28.01 mmol · L(-1) by ion chromatography. It was demonstrated that PLS based on dominant factor method is superior to the rest of the three analysis methods, which can be used in situ calibration, with the mean relative error about 1.128%. All the results show that analysis accuracy would be improved by the PLS based on dominant factor method to predict concentration of acid radical ions.

[Raman Signal Enhancement for Gas Detection Using a Near Concentric Cavity].

The detection of dissolved gases in seawater plays an important role in ocean observation and exploration. Raman spectroscopy has a great advantage in simultaneous multiple species detection and is thus regarded as a favorable choice for ocean application. However, its sensitivity remains insufficient, and a demand in enhancements is called! for before putting Raman spectroscopy to actual use in marine studies In this work, we developed a near-concentric cavity, in which laser beam could be trapped and reflected back and forth, for the purpose of intensifying Raman signals. The factors that would influence Raman signals were taken into account. The result show that the smaller angle between collection direction and optical axis of reflection mirror, the stronger the signal and signal to noise ratio (SNR) is. With a collection angle of 30 degrees, our Near-concentric Cavity System managed to raise the SNR to a figure about 16 times larger than that of common methods applying 90 degrees. Moreover, the alignment pattern in our system made it possible to excel concentric cavity with a 3 times larger SNR. Compared with the single-pass Raman signal, the signal intensity of our near-concentric cavity was up to 70 times enhanced. According to the obtained results of CO2 measurement, it can be seen that the new system provides a limit of detection(LOD) for CO2 about 0.19 mg x L(-1) using 3-σ criterion standard, and the LOD of 11.5 µg x L(-1) for CH4 was evaluated with the theoretical cross section values of CO2 and CH4.

[The measurement of methane dissolved in water using raman spectroscopy assisted with CCl4 extraction].

While under laboratory conditions, the concentration of methane dissolved in water is too low to be detected because of the low solubility of methane using Raman spectroscopy. In the present paper, a novel approach based on CCl4 extraction was introduced, and used in the measurement of methane dissolved in water using Raman spectroscopy under laboratory conditions. Saturated aqueous solution of CH4, CCl4 solution after extraction of CH4 from the saturated aqueous solution and the saturated CCl4 solution of CH4 were prepared, and the Raman spectra of three samples were obtained. The obtained results show that the CH4 dissolved in saturated aqueous solution(the concentration of CH4 is about 1.14 mmol x L(-1)) can't been detected using Raman spectroscopy under laboratory conditions, but the CH4 Raman peak can be clearly seen in the spectra obtained for CCl4 solution after extraction. All the results demonstrate that the proposed approach can improve the Raman spectroscopy sensitivity of methane detection dissolved in water, and this approach has significant potential to be developed as an effective method for detection of methane dissolved in water.