Biodiversity of methanogenic and other Archaea in permanently frozen Lake Fryxell, Antarctica. Appl Environ Microbiol 72

• Main Authors: Elizabeth A. Karr, Joshua M. Ng, Sara M. Belchik, W. Matthew Sattley, Michael T. Madigan, Laurie A. Achenbach, Chemolithotrophic Bacteria (w. M. Sattley, E. A. Karr
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2006
• Subjects: Frozen Lake; Fryxell; Lake Fryxell; McMurdo Dry Valleys; Taylor Valley; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.564.1794; http://mcm-dvlakesmo.montana.edu/images/data/publications/karretal2006archaea.pdf

Antarctica. Two clusters of methanogens were detected in the sediments, and another cluster of possibly methanotrophic Euryarchaeota was detected in the anoxic water column just above the sediments. One crenarchaeote was detected in water just below the oxycline. The Archaea present in Lake Fryxell are likely involved in the major biogeochemical cycles that occur there. Several permanently frozen lakes exist in the Taylor Valley, McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica. These lakes support an exclusively microbial biology and have waters that vary from strictly freshwater to hypersaline (33). Lake Fryxell is essen-tially a freshwater lake (18, 33) and is the most productive of the lakes in the Taylor Valley (20). However, Lake Fryxell also shows significant sulfur cycling (10); the water column has a strong gradient of sulfide, exceeding 1 mM just above the sediments (Fig. 1). Our previous work has shown that a diverse community of phototrophic purple bacteria (1, 12, 13), sulfur