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The Phylum Thaumarchaeota

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The Prokaryotes

Abstract

Thaumarchaeota represent a unique phylum within the domain Archaea that embraces ammonia-oxidizing organisms from soil, marine waters, and hot springs (currently two pure cultures and 13 enrichments), as well as many lineages represented only by environmental sequences from virtually every habitat that has been screened. All cultivated Thaumarchaeota perform the first step in nitrification, i.e., they oxidize ammonia to nitrite aerobically. They live under autotrophic conditions and fix CO2, but some are dependent on the presence of other bacteria or small amounts of organic material. Different from bacterial ammonia oxidizers, all cultivated Thaumarchaeota are adapted to comparably low amounts of substrate (ammonia) and inhabit not only moderate but also extreme environments, such as hot springs and acidic soils. All cultivated strains contain tetraether lipids with crenarchaeol, a Thaumarchaeota-specific core lipid.

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Acknowledgments

We apologize to all authors whose papers have not been cited in this chapter due to space limitation. We thank Anja Spang for critical reading of the manuscript. MS was funded by the Austrian Science Fund project P23000, and RA was funded through ESF project CryoCARB and project P25369 from the Austrian Science Fund.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ecogenomics and Systems Biology/Archaea Biology and Ecogenomics Group, University of Vienna, Althanstraße 14, 1090, Vienna, Austria

    Michaela Stieglmeier, Ricardo J. E. Alves & Christa Schleper

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  1. Michaela Stieglmeier
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  2. Ricardo J. E. Alves
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  3. Christa Schleper
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Correspondence to Christa Schleper .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Eugene Rosenberg

  2. Department of Biological Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Edward F. DeLong

  3. Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education, University of Hawaii, Manoa, Honolulu, HI, USA

    Edward F. DeLong

  4. Department of Microbiology and Immunobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

    Stephen Lory

  5. Leibniz Institute DSMZ-German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures, Braunschweig, Germany

    Erko Stackebrandt

  6. Laboratory of Microbiology, Institute of Biology, Center for Health Sciences, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Ilha do Fundão, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Fabiano Thompson

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Stieglmeier, M., Alves, R.J.E., Schleper, C. (2014). The Phylum Thaumarchaeota. In: Rosenberg, E., DeLong, E.F., Lory, S., Stackebrandt, E., Thompson, F. (eds) The Prokaryotes. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38954-2_338

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