Abstract
Submarine mud volcanoes (MVs) have attracted significant interest in the scientific community for obtaining clues on the subsurface biosphere. On-land MVs, which are much less focused in this context, are equally important, and they may even provide insights also for astrobiology of extraterrestrial mud volcanism. Hereby, we characterized microbial communities of two active methane-see** on-land MVs, Murono and Kamou, in central Japan. 16S rRNA gene profiling of those sites recovered the dominant archaeal sequences affiliated with methanogens. Anaerobic methanotrophs (ANME), with the subgroups ANME-1b and ANME-3, were recovered only from the Murono site albeit a greatly reduced relative abundance in the community compared to those of typical submarine MVs. The bacterial sequences affiliated to Caldatribacteriota JS1 were recovered from both sites; on the other hand, sulfate-reducing bacteria (SRB) of Desulfobulbaceae was recovered only from the Murono site. The major difference of on-land MVs from submarine MVs is that the high concentrations of sulfate are not always introduced to the subsurface from above. In addition, the XRD analysis of Murono shows the absence of sulfate-, sulfur-related mineral. Therefore, we hypothesize one scenario of ANME-1b and ANME-3 thriving at the depth of the Murono site independently from SRB, which is similar to the situations reported in some other methane-see** sites with a sulfate-depleted condition. We note that previous investigations speculate that the erupted materials from Murono and Kamou originate from the Miocene marine strata. The fact that SRB (Desulfobulbaceae) capable of associating with ANME-3 was recovered from the Murono site presents an alternative scenario: the old sea-related juvenile water somehow worked as the source of additional sulfur-related components for the SRB-ANME syntrophic consortium forming at a deeper zone of the site. However, the reason for the differences between Murono and Kamou is still unknown, and this requires further investigation.
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Data availability
Nucleotide sequence data reported in this paper are available in the DDBJ sequenced Read Archive under the accession numbers DRX221637 to DRX221644 and DRX251432 to DRX251435. Please contact author for any other data requests.
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Acknowledgements
We thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments that helped us in improving the manuscript. The fieldwork was supported by a project focusing on geology and astrobiology of mud volcanoes (Planetary Exploration Research Center, Chiba Institute of Technology). We would like to express our most gratitude to the Waseda University Automobile Club for granting us access to their training circuit for our fieldwork. Makito Kobayashi (University of Tokyo) and Dr. Hiroshi Sakuma (National Institute for Materials Science) contributed to the mineral analysis of this project. Finally, we would like to thank Dr. Shingo Kato (Japan Collection of Microorganisms, RIKEN BioResource Research Center) for his continuous support in this project.
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by Nori Miyake, Ryo Ishimaru, and Goro Komatsu. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Nori Miyake and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Miyake, N., Ishimaru, R., Komatsu, G. et al. Characterization of archaeal and bacterial communities thriving in methane-see** on-land mud volcanoes, Niigata, Japan. Int Microbiol 26, 191–204 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10123-022-00288-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10123-022-00288-z