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Applied and Environmental Microbiology, November 2000, p. 4829-4833, Vol. 66, No. 11
0099-2240/00/$04.00+0
Copyright © 2000, American Society for Microbiology. All rights reserved.

Marine Planktonic Archaea Take Up Amino Acids

Cleber C. Ouverney* and Jed A. Fuhrman

Department of Biological Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089-0371

Received 21 June 2000/Accepted 14 August 2000

Archaea are traditionally thought of as "extremophiles," but recent studies have shown that marine planktonic Archaea make up a surprisingly large percentage of ocean midwater microbial communities, up to 60% of the total prokaryotes. However, the basic physiology and contribution of Archaea to community microbial activity remain unknown. We have studied Archaea from 200-m depths of the northwest Mediterranean Sea and the Pacific Ocean near California, measuring the archaeal activity under simulated natural conditions (8 to 17°C, dark and anaerobic) by means of a method called substrate tracking autoradiography fluorescence in situ hybridization (STARFISH) that simultaneously detects specific cell types by 16S rRNA probe binding and activity by microautoradiography. In the 200-m-deep Mediterranean and Pacific samples, cells binding the archaeal probes made up about 43 and 14% of the total countable cells, respectively. Our results showed that the Archaea are active in the uptake of dissolved amino acids from natural concentrations (nanomolar) with about 60% of the individuals in the archaeal communities showing measurable uptake. Bacteria showed a similar proportion of active cells. We concluded that a portion of these Archaea is heterotrophic and also appears to coexist successfully with Bacteria in the same water.


* Corresponding author. Present address: Dept. of Microbiology and Immunology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305-5124. Phone: (650) 493-5000 (ext. 63163). Fax: (650) 852-3291. E-mail: ouverney{at}stanford.edu.


Applied and Environmental Microbiology, November 2000, p. 4829-4833, Vol. 66, No. 11
0099-2240/00/$04.00+0
Copyright © 2000, American Society for Microbiology. All rights reserved.



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