Abstract
Microbes can be found in hypersaline environments forming diverse populations with complex ecological interactions. Microbes in such environments were found to be involved in the formation of minerals including dolomite, a mineral of economic importance and whose origin has been long-debated. Various reports on in vitro experiments using pure cultures provided evidence for the microbial role in dolomite formation. However, culturing experiments have been limited in scope and do not fully address the possible interactions of the naturally occurring microbial communities; consequently, the ability of microbes as a community to form dolomite has been investigated in this study. Our experiments focused on examining the microbial composition by culturing aerobic heterotrophs from the top hypersaline sediments of Al-Khiran sabkha in Kuwait, a modern dolomite-forming environment. The objectives of this study were to assess the ability of two microbial consortia to form dolomite using enrichment culture experiments, mineralogy, and metagenomics. Proto-dolomite was formed by a microbial community dominated by Halomonas strains whereby degradation of the extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) was observed and the pH changed from 7.00 to 8.58. Conversely, proto-dolomite was not observed within a microbial community dominated by Clostridiisalibacter in which EPS continuously accumulated and the pH slightly changed from 7.00 to 7.29.
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Data availability
Metagenomic sequences are submitted to NCBI under SRA Accession No. PRJNA551135.
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Acknowledgements
This study was funded by the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (KFAS) (Project Code: PR17-12SL-10) to HM and by the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grant to MD. The authors are solely responsible for the statements made in this publication. The authors would like to acknowledge Robert Temkin from the Department of Biological Sciences, University of Toronto Scarborough for his assistance with SEM imaging, George Kretschmann and Yanan Liu from the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Toronto for their assistance with conducting SEM-EDS, XRD, and EPMA analyses, and Susan Eapen for her assistance in laboratory work at Kuwait University.
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AA, DG, HM, and MD contributed to the conception of the research and study design. AA was responsible for conducting all laboratory experiments, collecting data, data analysis, and writing the manuscript. AA, DG, HM, and MD were involved in data interpretation and revising and approving the final draft of the manuscript to be published. AA, DG, HM, and MD agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work and ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are investigated and resolved appropriately.
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ESM_1 Metagenomic taxonomic classification of microbial consortia using MetaPhlAn2 for ACM1 and ACM2 samples (XLSX 9 kb)
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ESM_2 Full-length 16S rRNA gene taxonomic classification of microbial consortia using QIIME for ACM1 and ACM2 samples (XLSX 19 kb)
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ESM_3 Halomonas strains taxonomic classification and 16S rRNA gene, partial sequences for ACM1 and ACM2 samples (XLSX 24 kb)
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Alibrahim, A., Al-Gharabally, D., Mahmoud, H. et al. Proto-dolomite formation in microbial consortia dominated by Halomonas strains. Extremophiles 23, 765–781 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00792-019-01135-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00792-019-01135-2