Applied and Environmental Science

Many animals and protists depend on symbiotic sulfur-oxidizing bacteria as their main food source. These bacteria use energy from oxidizing inorganic sulfur compounds to make biomass autotrophically from CO₂, serving as primary producers for their hosts. Here we describe a clade of nonautotrophic sulfur-oxidizing symbionts, “Candidatus Kentron,” associated with marine ciliates. They lack genes for known autotrophic...

Natural products provide the inspiration for most clinical drugs. With the rise in antibiotic resistance, it is imperative to discover new sources of chemical diversity. Bacteria living in symbiosis with marine invertebrates have emerged as an untapped source of natural chemistry. While symbiotic bacteria are often recalcitrant to growth in the lab, advances in metagenomic sequencing and assembly now make it possible to access their...

Much of life on Earth exists in a very slow-growing state, with microbes from deeply buried marine sediments representing an extreme example. These environments are like natural laboratories that have run multi-thousand-year experiments that are impossible to perform in a laboratory. We borrowed some techniques that are commonly used in laboratory experiments and applied them to these natural samples to make hypotheses about how these...

One-carbon compounds such as methane and methanol are of increasing interest as sustainable substrates for biological production of fuels and industrial chemicals. The bacteria that carry out these conversions have been studied for many decades, but gaps exist in our knowledge of their metabolic pathways. One such gap is the difference between growth on methane and growth on methanol. Understanding such metabolism is important, since...