So this is a, let’s see if I get this right, Zetaproteobacteria. Correct.
We’re focusing our efforts quite a bit on iron microbiology and we’re finding there’s an awful lot of iron that’s getting put into the oceans,
basically fertilizing the oceans, that’s coming from hydrothermal vents.
We’ve got our intact mat at the bottom here.
Craig Moyer and his group are very interested in the iron-oxidizing microbial mats.
There’s a little piece of intact mat.
They’re kind of fluffy deposits that we see on the seafloor.
It’s not that little. This is big.
The iron mats are made up of what’s called iron ferrihydrite, primarily.
They can also have some clays in them.
They have a lot of polysaccharides, or microbial snot, and then there’s the cells that are actually doing a lot of the chemical transformations.
That one’s kind of cool.
So we brought up big chunks of the microbial mat, which we hope are intact, and then with the scalpel,
we try to like, peel back layers, kind of, to show if there’s any directionality or orientation that we can see just by looking at it.
I think it, like, this is the outside, right here, and they’re all coming, like, up.
The bacteria are oxidizing iron, but what that’s basically doing is taking iron from the soluble form and converting it to a solid form.
This was crotched by Margo Heygood as a gift for me for my master’s degree.
So these are the cells of the Zetaproteobacteria on the end.
So that bacteria is just this part?
Yes.
And everything else is just iron oxide?
Yeah. And so all this is the iron oxide that the cells are producing.
So this is not life size.
No. But it’s a bit to scale. And it’s meant to represent what we know about the Zetaproteobacteria.
Zetaproteobacteria seem to dominate all the iron systems in and around hydrothermal vents.
They’re one of the main iron oxidizers that occur in the microbial mats in marine systems.
The different bacteria make cool structures.
Some of them twist, the iron comes out twisted, we call it a stalk.
Sometimes it’s like a tube. We call that a sheath.
So you can tell something about what was living there, like, based on what they make, what kind of structures they make.
So the cell uses the iron oxides to move through the environment.
Oh really.
And it’s twisting as it’s doing that.
And then as it’s gaining energy, growing larger, then it divides, and that’s what’s represented by…
Oh, so these two guys used to be one, and now they’re two?
Exactly.
That is crazy.
And when we look at the mats, you can tell which direction the mat was formed in by looking for these division points.
Wow.
When you see these nice mats on the bottom, they’re not just all microbiology, but it’s really the history of the microbes that have been there before them,
as well as the ones that are actually growing right now.
It is good in the lab where it’s a bit air conditioned, but it doesn’t quite fit around as a scarf.