| Summary: | © The Author(s), 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC). The definitive version was published in Vuillemin, A., Wankel, S. D., Coskun, Ö. K., Magritsch, T., Vargas, S., Estes, E. R., Spivack, A. J., Smith, D. C., Pockalny, R., Murray, R. W., D'Hondt, S., & Orsi, W. D. Archaea dominate oxic subseafloor communities over multimillion-year time scales. Science Advances, 5(6), (2019): eaaw4108, doi:10.1126/sciadv.aaw4108. Ammonia-oxidizing archaea (AOA) dominate microbial communities throughout oxic subseafloor sediment deposited over millions of years in the North Atlantic Ocean. Rates of nitrification correlated with the abundance of these dominant AOA populations, whose metabolism is characterized by ammonia oxidation, mixotrophic utilization of organic nitrogen, deamination, and the energetically efficient chemolithoautotrophic hydroxypropionate/hydroxybutyrate carbon fixation cycle. These AOA thus have the potential to couple mixotrophic and chemolithoautotrophic metabolism via mixotrophic deamination of organic nitrogen, followed by oxidation of the regenerated ammonia for additional energy to fuel carbon fixation. This metabolic feature likely reduces energy loss and improves AOA fitness under energy-starved, oxic conditions, thereby allowing them to outcompete other taxa for millions of years. This work was supported primarily by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) project OR 417/1-1 granted to W.D.O. Preliminary work was supported by the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations project OCE-0939564 also granted to W.D.O. Publication of the manuscript was supported by the LMU Mentoring Program. The expedition was funded by the US National Science Foundation through grant NSF-OCE-1433150 to A.J.S, S.D., and R.P. R.W.M. led the expedition. This is a contribution of the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO). S.D.W. acknowledges partial support from NASA Exobiology (NNX15AM04G). This is Center for Dark Energy Biosphere ...
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