Archaeal Ecology

Isabel Ferrera, Portland State University, Oregon, USA
Cristina D Takacs‐Vesbach, University of New Mexico, New Mexico, USA
Anna‐Louise Reysenbach, Portland State University, Oregon, USA

Published online: July 2008

DOI: 10.1002/9780470015902.a0000338.pub2

The Archaea represent one of the three domains of life and are distinguished from the Bacteria and Eukarya phylogenetically and biochemically. As a group, the Archaea are physiologically diverse and inhabit a wide range of ecosystems, including the most extreme environments on Earth, where they contribute to global energy cycles.

Keywords: Archaea; Crenarchaeota; Euryarchaeota; thermophiles; halophiles; methanogens

Figure 1. The universal tree of life based on comparisons of small subunit (16S or 18S) rRNA sequence analysis.
Figure 2. Moose Pool, Yellowstone National Park, USA, site where Sulfolobus was first cultured. Inset shows a close-up of sulfur-lined gas bubbles that emanate from the springs.
Figure 3. The distribution and some physical aspects of hydrothermal springs and vents. Top: The distribution of some terrestrial (squares) and marine (circles) hydrothermal vents (adapted from Shank et al., 1999). Middle: The Yellowstone hydrothermal system (adapted from Smith and Siegel, 2000). Bottom: The marine hydrothermal vent setting.
Figure 4. Top: Obsidian Pool, Yellowstone National Park, USA, where members of the recently proposed kingdom ‘Korarchaeota’ were first detected by molecular techniques. Bottom: A deep-sea hydrothermal vent along the Southern East Pacific Rise. A probe deployed by the submersible ALVIN is shown measuring the temperature of hydrothermal fluid exiting the vent. Note how closely tubeworms live near the vent.
close
 References
    DeLong EF (1992) Archaea in coastal marine environments. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 89: 5685–5689.
    DeLong EF, Wu KY, Prezelin BB and Jovine RVM (1994) High abundance of Archaea in Antarctic marine picoplankton. Nature 371: 695–697.
    book Grant WD, Gemmell RT and McGenity TJ (1998) "Halophiles". In: Horikoshi K and Grant WD (eds) Extremophiles: Microbial Life in Extreme Environments, pp 93–132. New York: Wiley.
    Huber JA, Welch DB, Morrison HG et al. (2007) Microbial population structures in the deep marine biosphere. Science 318: 97–100.
    Könneke M, Bernhard AE, de la Torre JR et al. (2005) Isolation of an autotrophic ammonia-oxidizing marine archaeon. Nature 37: 543–546.
    Leadbetter JR, Schmidt TM, Graber JR and Breznak JA (1999) Acetogenesis from H2 plus CO2 by spirochetes from termite guts. Science 283: 686–689.
    Leininger S, Urich T, Schloter M et al. (2006) Archaea predominate among ammonia-oxidizing prokaryotes in soils. Nature 442: 806–809.
    McCollom TM and Shock EL (1997) Geochemical constraints on chemolithoautotrophic metabolism by microorganisms in seafloor hydrothermal systems. Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 61: 4375–4391.
    Mehta MP and Baross JA (2006) Nitrogen fixation at 92°C by a hydrothermal vent archaeon. Science 314: 1783–1786.
    Preston CM, Wu KY, Molinski TF and DeLong EF (1996) A psychrophilic crenarchaeon inhabits a marine sponge: Cenarchaeum symbiosum gen. nov., sp. nov. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 93: 6241–6246.
    Reysenbach AL, Liu Y, Banta AB et al. (2006) A ubiquitous thermoacidophilic archaeon from deep-sea hydrothermal vents. Nature 442: 444–447.
    Schleper C, Jurgens G and Jonuscheit M (2005) Genomic studies of uncultivated archaea. Nature Reviews. Microbiology 3: 479–488.
    Shank TM, Black MB, Halanych K, Lutz RA and Vrijenhoek RC (1999) Miocene radiation of deep-sea hydrothermal vent shrimp (Caridea: Bresiliidae): evidence from mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit I. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 13: 244–254.
    book Smith RB and Siegel LJ (2000) Windows into the Earth, The Geologic Story of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Stein JL, Marsh TL, Wu KY, Shizuya H and DeLong EF (1996) Characterization of uncultivated prokaryotes: isolation and analysis of a 40-kilobase-pair genome fragment from a planktonic marine archaeon. Journal of Bacteriology 178: 591–599.
    book Stetter KO (1998) "Hyperthermophiles: isolation, classification, and properties". In: Horikoshi K and Grant WD (eds) Extremophiles: Microbial Life in Extreme Environments, pp 1–24. New York: Wiley.
 Further Reading
    book Ferry JG (1993) Methanogenesis. New York: Chapman and Hall.
    book Garrett R and Klenk HP (2007) Archaea: Evolution, Physiology, and Molecular Biology. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
    book Horikoshi K and Grant WD (1998) Extremophiles: Microbial Life in Extreme Environments. New York: Wiley.
    Jones BE, Grant WD, Duckworth AW and Owenson GG (1998) Microbial diversity of Soda Lakes. Extremophiles 2: 191–200.

Related Sub-Topics:

Physiological Ecology | Organisms and the Physical Environment | Archaea | Environmental Microbiology | Extremophiles
Contact Editor close
Submit a note to the editor about this article by filling in the form below.

* Required Field

Article Title: Archaeal Ecology
 
How to Cite close
Ferrera, Isabel, Takacs‐Vesbach, Cristina D, and Reysenbach, Anna‐Louise(Jul 2008) Archaeal Ecology. In: eLS. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Chichester. http://www.els.net [doi: 10.1002/9780470015902.a0000338.pub2]