Articles | Volume 17, issue 2
https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-17-317-2020
https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-17-317-2020
Research article
 | 
22 Jan 2020
Research article |  | 22 Jan 2020

Structural elucidation and environmental distributions of butanetriol and pentanetriol dialkyl glycerol tetraethers (BDGTs and PDGTs)

Sarah Coffinet, Travis B. Meador, Lukas Mühlena, Kevin W. Becker, Jan Schröder, Qing-Zeng Zhu, Julius S. Lipp, Verena B. Heuer, Matthew P. Crump, and Kai-Uwe Hinrichs

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Cited articles

Becker, K. W., Lipp, J. S., Versteegh, G. J. M., Wörmer, L., and Hinrichs, K.-U.: Rapid and simultaneous analysis of three molecular sea surface temperature proxies and application to sediments from the Sea of Marmara, Org. Geochem., 85, 42–53, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orggeochem.2015.04.008, 2015. 
Becker, K. W., Elling, F. J., Yoshinaga, M. Y., Söllinger, A., Urich, T., and Hinrichs, K.-U.: Unusual butane- and pentanetriol-based tetraether lipids in Methanomassiliicoccus luminyensis, a representative of the seventh order of methanogens, Appl. Environ. Microb., 82, 4505–4516, https://doi.org/10.1128/AEM.00772-16, 2016. 
Borrel, G., Parisot, N., Harris, H. M., Peyretaillade, E., Gaci, N., Tottey, W., Bardot, O., Raymann, K., Gribaldo, S., Peyret, P., O'Toole, P. W., and Brugère, J.-F.: Comparative genomics highlights the unique biology of Methanomassiliicoccales, a Thermoplasmatales-related seventh order of methanogenic archaea that encodes pyrrolysine, BMC Genomics, 15, 679, https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2164-15-679, 2014. 
Bradley, J. A., Amend, J. P., and LaRowe, D. E.: Survival of the fewest: Microbial dormancy and maintenance in marine sediments through deep time, Geobiology, 17, 43–59, https://doi.org/10.1111/gbi.12313, 2019. 
Chen, I.-M. A., Chu, K., Palaniappan, K., Pillay, M., Ratner, A., Huang, J., Huntemann, M., Varghese, N., White, J. R., Seshadri, R., Smirnova, T., Kirton, E., Jungbluth, S. P., Woyke, T., Eloe-Fadrosh, E. A., Ivanova, N. N., and Kyrpides, N. C.: IMG/M v.5.0: an integrated data management and comparative analysis system for microbial genomes and microbiomes, Nucleic Acids Res., 47, D666–D677, https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gky901, 2019. 
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Short summary
This study deals with two membrane lipids called BDGTs and PDGTs. Membrane lipids are molecules forming the cell envelope of all organisms. Different organisms produce different lipids thus they can be used to detect the presence of specific organisms in the environment. We analyzed the structure of these new lipids and looked for potential producers. We found that they are likely made by microbes emitting methane below the sediment surface and could be used to track these specific microbes.
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