Noviherbaspirillum

by Cliff Bueno de Mesquita

Hello everyone, and happy leap year! We are excited to announce that we received a third year of funding from the Catto Foundation to study the effects of glyphosate herbicides on soil microbial communities here in Colorado prairies.
 
I will share some information about another organism that responded to our nutrient and water amendment experiment on Volcán Llullaillaco in 2016. In addition to the Naganishia yeast, Dothideomycetes fungi, and Neochlorosarcina algae (see January post), we saw that Oxalobacteraceae within the Noviherbaspirillum genus significantly increased in soil microcosms with multiple water additions. The Oxalobacteraceae family is widespread in cryophilic and oligotrophic environments such as glacier-fed streams (Wilhelm et al. 2013), glacier forefields (Bajerski et al. 2013), cryoconites (Zhang et al. 2011) and high elevation periglacial soils (Vimercati et al. 2019). This family is metabolically diverse, and some genera are adapted to oligotrophic conditions (Baldani et al. 2014), which may allow them to use different aeolian deposited carbon sources. Some members of the Noviherbaspirillum genus have also been shown to be resistant to gamma radiation (Cheptsov et al. 2017) and close relatives of this OTU carry the nif genes (Baldani et al. 2014), which indicates that this OTU may make nitrogen available in this nutrient limited environment. Their lower relative abundance in soil microcosms that received both nutrient and water additions adds evidence for this group being oligotrophic and therefore being outcompeted by different phylotypes that show a faster response to carbon and nutrients alleviation.

Figure 1. Image of Noviherbaspirillum humi, a new species in the genus isolated in soil and characterized by Sundararaman et al. 2016, who published this Figure in their article.

References:
Bajerski, F., Ganzert, L., Mangelsdorf, K., Lipski, A., Busse, H.J., Padur, L. and Wagner, D., 2013. Herbaspirillum psychrotolerans sp. nov., a member of the family Oxalobacteraceae from a glacier forefield. International journal of systematic and evolutionary microbiology, 63(9), pp.3197-3203.

Baldani, J.I., Rouws, L., Cruz, L.M., Olivares, F.L., Schmid, M. and Hartmann, A., 2014. The family Oxalobacteraceae. The Prokaryotes: Alphaproteobacteria and Betaproteobacteria, pp.919-974.

Cheptsov, Vladimir S., Elena A. Vorobyova, Natalia A. Manucharova, Mikhail V. Gorlenko, Anatoli K. Pavlov, Maria A. Vdovina, Vladimir N. Lomasov, and Sergey A. Bulat. "100 kGy gamma-affected microbial communities within the ancient Arctic permafrost under simulated Martian conditions." Extremophiles 21, no. 6 (2017): 1057-1067.

Sundararaman, A., Srinivasan, S., Lee, S. 2016. Noviherbaspirillum humi sp. nov., isolated from soil. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek 109, 697-704.

Vimercati L., Solon, A.J., Krinsky, A., Arán, P., Porazinska, D.L., Darcy, J.L., Dorador, C., Schmidt, S.K. 2019. Nieves penitentes are a new habitat for snow algae in one of the most extreme high-elevation environments on Earth.  Arct. Antarct. Alp. Res. https://doi.org/10.1080/15230430.2019.1618115

Wilhelm, L., Singer, G.A., Fasching, C., Battin, T.J. and Besemer, K., 2013. Microbial biodiversity in glacier-fed streams. The ISME journal, 7(8), p.1651.
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Zhang, X., Ma, X., Wang, N. and Yao, T., 2009. New subgroup of Bacteroidetes and
diverse microorganisms in Tibetan plateau glacial ice provide a biological record of environmental conditions. FEMS microbiology ecology, 67(1), pp.21-29.