Abstract
To date, very little is known about the bacterial core community of marine sediments. Here we study the environmental distribution, abundance and ecogenomics of the gammaproteobacterial Woeseiaceae/JTB255 marine benthic group. A meta-analysis of published work shows that the Woeseiaceae/JTB255 are ubiquitous and consistently rank among the most abundant 16S rRNA gene sequences in diverse marine sediments. They account for up to 22% of bacterial amplicons and 6% of total cell counts in European and Australian coastal sediments. The analysis of a single-cell genome, metagenomic bins and the genome of the next cultured relative Woeseia oceani indicated a broad physiological range, including heterotrophy and facultative autotrophy. All tested (meta)genomes encode a truncated denitrification pathway to nitrous oxide. The broad range of energy-yielding metabolisms possibly explains the ubiquity and high abundance of Woeseiaceae/JTB255 in marine sediments, where they carry out diverse, but yet unknown ecological functions.
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Acknowledgements
We greatly acknowledge the excellent service by Dr Claudia Bergin from the Microbial Single Cell Genomics facility at SciLifeLab in Uppsala, Sweden. Kenneth Wasmund provided helpful comments on the manuscript. We thank Professor Rudolf Amann at MPI Bremen/Germany and Professor Michael Wagner at DoME Vienna/Austria for the excellent support. Jörg Wulf and Christian Castro-Romero provided great technical assistance. The Max Planck Society, Germany, funded this study.
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Mußmann, M., Pjevac, P., Krüger, K. et al. Genomic repertoire of the Woeseiaceae/JTB255, cosmopolitan and abundant core members of microbial communities in marine sediments. ISME J 11, 1276–1281 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2016.185
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2016.185
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