A moderately thermophilic ammonia-oxidizing crenarchaeote from a hot spring

By R. Hatzenpichler, E. Lebedeva, E. Spieck, K. Stoecker, Andreas Richter, H. Daims, Michael Wagner. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2008

701 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The recent discovery of ammonia-oxidizing archaea (AOA) dramatically changed our perception of the diversity and evolutionary history of microbes involved in nitrification. In this study, a moderately thermophilic (46°C) ammonia-oxidizing enrichment culture, which had been seeded with biomass from a hot spring, was screened for ammonia oxidizers. Although gene sequences for crenarchaeotal 16S rRNA and two subunits of the ammonia monooxygenase (amoA and amoB) were detected via PCR, no hints for known ammonia-oxidizing bacteria were obtained. Comparative sequence analyses of these gene fragments demonstrated the presence of a single operational taxonomic unit and thus enabled the assignment of the amoA and amoB sequences to the respective 16S rRNA phylotype, which belongs to the widely distributed group I.1b (soil group) of the Crenarchaeota. Catalyzed reporter deposition (CARD)–FISH combined with microautoradiography (MAR) demonstrated metabolic activity of this archaeon in the presence of ammonium. This finding was corroborated by the detection of amoA gene transcripts in the enrichment. CARD-FISH/MAR showed that the moderately thermophilic AOA is highly active at 0.14 and 0.79 mM ammonium and is partially inhibited by a concentration of 3.08 mM. The enriched AOA, which is provisionally classified as “Candidatus Nitrososphaera gargensis,” is the first described thermophilic ammonia oxidizer and the first member of the crenarchaeotal group I.1b for which ammonium oxidation has been verified on a cellular level. Its preference for thermophilic conditions reinvigorates the debate on the thermophilic ancestry of AOA.

Subfields: Ecology, Environmental Engineering, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cf374604cf4f5cf3a116296d37ed8c8cb9504a54

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Citations in the corpus

Crenarchaeol tracks winter blooms of ammonia‐oxidizing Thaumarchaeota in the coastal North Sea (2011, positive): “These include Cenarchaeum symbiosum (Hallam et al. 2006b), Nitrosopumilus maritimus (Könneke et al. 2005), ‘‘Candidatus Nitrososphaera gargensis’’ (Hatzenpichler et al. 2008), ‘‘Candidatus Nitrosocaldus yellowstonii’’ (de la Torre et al. 2008), ‘‘Candidatus Nitrosoarchaeum limnia’’ (Blainey et al.…”
Environmental factors shaping the ecological niches of ammonia-oxidizing archaea. (2009, methodology): “…environments such as open-ocean, marine water columns, sediments and hot springs (Wuchter et al., 2006; Coolen et al., 2007; Lam et al., 2007; Hatzenpichler et al., 2008; Herrmann et al., 2008; FEMS Microbiol Rev 33 (2009) 855–869c 2009 Federation of European Microbiological Societies…”
Current insights into the autotrophic thaumarchaeal ammonia oxidation in acidic soils (2012, background): “…gargensis, ThAOA/ HWCG III Nitrosocaldus yellowstonii have shown a capacity to oxidize ammonia (Könneke et al., 2005; Hallam et al., 2006; de la Torre et al., 2008; Hatzenpichler et al., 2008; Blainey et al., 2011; Jung et al., 2011; Lehtovirta-Morley et al., 2011; Tourna et al., 2011).”
Nitrososphaera viennensis, an ammonia oxidizing archaeon from soil (2011, positive): “This is considerably higher than the inhibitory concentration of 2 to 3 mM reported for the aquatic strains N. maritimus (19) and N. gargensis (11).”
Estuarine Nitrifiers: New Players, Patterns and Processes (2010, positive): “Two distinct AOA enriched from 22 hot springs, one that is related to other AOA from soils (Hatzenpichler et al., 2008), the other 23 forming a distinct cluster that does not fall within either the water column/sediment or the 24 soil/sediment clusters (de la Torre et al., 2008), have recently been…”
Nitrification driven by bacteria and not archaea in nitrogen-rich grassland soils (2009, background): “, and AOA growth has also been observed on addition of low concentrations of ammoniu”
Kinetic analysis of a complete nitrifier reveals an oligotrophic lifestyle (2017, positive): “The complete nitrifier N. inopinata1 isolated in this study; N. gargensis, an AOA strain isolated from a hot spring14,16; Ca. N. uzonensis, an AOA strain enriched from a hot spring15; Ca. N. uzonensis-related strain 5A enriched from hot well water (this study); and N. viennensis, an AOA strain…”
Effect of nitrification inhibitors on the growth and activity of Nitrosotalea devanaterra in culture and soil (2013, positive): “, 1998), AOA appear less sensitive in both liquid culture and the soil environment (Hatzenpichler et al., 2008; Taylor et al., 2010; Jung et al., 2011).”
Nitrosopumilus maritimus genome reveals unique mechanisms for nitrification and autotrophy in globally distributed marine crenarchaea (2010, background): “The third 2dMCO (Nmar_1354), possessing a fused blue copper-containing domain, has not been found in AOB and appears to be unique to AOA.”
Examining the global distribution of dominant archaeal populations in soil (2011, background): “DSC1 and DSC2 were not closely related to the only known group 1.1b crenarchaeotal isolate Candidatus Nitrososphaera gargensis (from hot springs; Hatzenpichler et al., 2008); however, they did form a tight clade (Figure 1) with the uncultured soil clone '54d9' (a large genomic fragment obtained…”
Relative contributions of archaea and bacteria to aerobic ammonia oxidation in the environment. (2008, background): “The potential for crenarchaeal ammonia oxidation has also been confirmed by enrichment (Hatzenpichler et al., 2008) and isolation (de la Torre et al., 2008) of ammoniaoxidizing archaea from terrestrial hot springs.”