Peculiar citric acid cycle of hydrothermal vent chemolithoautotroph Hydrogenovibrio crunogenus, and insights into carbon metabolism by obligate autotrophs.

The genome sequence of the obligate chemolithoautotroph Hydrogenovibrio crunogenus paradoxically predicts a complete oxidative citric acid cycle (CAC). This prediction was tested by multiple approaches including whole cell carbon assimilation to verify obligate autotrophy, phylogenetic analysis of CAC enzyme sequences and enzyme assays. Hydrogenovibrio crunogenus did not assimilate any of the organic compounds provided (acetate, succinate, glucose, yeast extract, tryptone). Enzyme activities confirmed that its CAC is mostly uncoupled from the NADH pool. 2-Oxoglutarate:ferredoxin oxidoreductase activity is absent, though pyruvate:ferredoxin oxidoreductase is present, indicating that sequence-based predictions of substrate for this oxidoreductase were incorrect, and that H. crunogenus may have an incomplete CAC. Though the H. crunogenus CAC genes encode uncommon enzymes, the taxonomic distribution of their top matches suggests that they were not horizontally acquired. Comparison of H. crunogenus CAC genes to those present in other 'Proteobacteria' reveals that H. crunogenus and other obligate autotrophs lack the functional redundancy for the steps of the CAC typical for facultative autotrophs and heterotrophs, providing another possible mechanism for obligate autotrophy.

Patterns of Transcript Abundance of Eukaryotic Biogeochemically-Relevant Genes in the Amazon River Plume.

The Amazon River has the largest discharge of all rivers on Earth, and its complex plume system fuels a wide array of biogeochemical processes, across a large area of the western tropical North Atlantic. The plume thus stimulates microbial processes affecting carbon sequestration and nutrient cycles at a global scale. Chromosomal gene expression patterns of the 2.0 to 156 µm size-fraction eukaryotic microbial community were investigated in the Amazon River Plume, generating a robust dataset (more than 100 million mRNA sequences) that depicts the metabolic capabilities and interactions among the eukaryotic microbes. Combining classical oceanographic field measurements with metatranscriptomics yielded characterization of the hydrographic conditions simultaneous with a quantification of transcriptional activity and identity of the community. We highlight the patterns of eukaryotic gene expression for 31 biogeochemically significant gene targets hypothesized to be valuable within forecasting models. An advantage to this targeted approach is that the database of reference sequences used to identify the target genes was selectively constructed and highly curated optimizing taxonomic coverage, throughput, and the accuracy of annotations. A coastal diatom bloom highly expressed nitrate transporters and carbonic anhydrase presumably to support high growth rates and enhance uptake of low levels of dissolved nitrate and CO2. Diatom-diazotroph association (DDA: diatoms with nitrogen fixing symbionts) blooms were common when surface salinity was mesohaline and dissolved nitrate concentrations were below detection, and hence did not show evidence of nitrate utilization, suggesting they relied on ammonium transporters to aquire recently fixed nitrogen. These DDA blooms in the outer plume had rapid turnover of the photosystem D1 protein presumably caused by photodegradation under increased light penetration in clearer waters, and increased expression of silicon transporters as silicon became limiting. Expression of these genes, including carbonic anhydrase and transporters for nitrate and phosphate, were found to reflect the physiological status and biogeochemistry of river plume environments. These relatively stable patterns of eukaryotic transcript abundance occurred over modest spatiotemporal scales, with similarity observed in sample duplicates collected up to 2.45 km in space and 120 minutes in time. These results confirm the use of metatranscriptomics as a valuable tool to understand and predict microbial community function.

Microspatial gene expression patterns in the Amazon River Plume.

We investigated expression of genes mediating elemental cycling at the microspatial scale in the ocean's largest river plume using, to our knowledge, the first fully quantitative inventory of genes and transcripts. The bacterial and archaeal communities associated with a phytoplankton bloom in Amazon River Plume waters at the outer continental shelf in June 2010 harbored ∼ 1.0 × 10(13) genes and 4.7 × 10(11) transcripts per liter that mapped to several thousand microbial genomes. Genomes from free-living cells were more abundant than those from particle-associated cells, and they generated more transcripts per liter for carbon fixation, heterotrophy, nitrogen and phosphorus uptake, and iron acquisition, although they had lower expression ratios (transcripts ⋅ gene(-1)) overall. Genomes from particle-associated cells contributed more transcripts for sulfur cycling, aromatic compound degradation, and the synthesis of biologically essential vitamins, with an overall twofold up-regulation of expression compared with free-living cells. Quantitatively, gene regulation differences were more important than genome abundance differences in explaining why microenvironment transcriptomes differed. Taxa contributing genomes to both free-living and particle-associated communities had up to 65% of their expressed genes regulated differently between the two, quantifying the extent of transcriptional plasticity in marine microbes in situ. In response to patchiness in carbon, nutrients, and light at the micrometer scale, Amazon Plume microbes regulated the expression of genes relevant to biogeochemical processes at the ecosystem scale.

The Amazon continuum dataset: quantitative metagenomic and metatranscriptomic inventories of the Amazon River plume, June 2010.

BACKGROUND: The Amazon River is by far the world's largest in terms of volume and area, generating a fluvial export that accounts for about a fifth of riverine input into the world's oceans. Marine microbial communities of the Western Tropical North Atlantic Ocean are strongly affected by the terrestrial materials carried by the Amazon plume, including dissolved (DOC) and particulate organic carbon (POC) and inorganic nutrients, with impacts on primary productivity and carbon sequestration. RESULTS: We inventoried genes and transcripts at six stations in the Amazon River plume during June 2010. At each station, internal standard-spiked metagenomes, non-selective metatranscriptomes, and poly(A)-selective metatranscriptomes were obtained in duplicate for two discrete size fractions (0.2 to 2.0 µm and 2.0 to 156 µm) using 150 × 150 paired-end Illumina sequencing. Following quality control, the dataset contained 360 million reads of approximately 200 bp average size from Bacteria, Archaea, Eukarya, and viruses. Bacterial metagenomes and metatranscriptomes were dominated by Synechococcus, Prochlorococcus, SAR11, SAR116, and SAR86, with high contributions from SAR324 and Verrucomicrobia at some stations. Diatoms, green picophytoplankton, dinoflagellates, haptophytes, and copepods dominated the eukaryotic genes and transcripts. Gene expression ratios differed by station, size fraction, and microbial group, with transcription levels varying over three orders of magnitude across taxa and environments. CONCLUSIONS: This first comprehensive inventory of microbial genes and transcripts, benchmarked with internal standards for full quantitation, is generating novel insights into biogeochemical processes of the Amazon plume and improving prediction of climate change impacts on the marine biosphere.