Methane eating bacteriaIn September of 2015, this site near Los Angeles became a major industrial ac

Methane eating bacteriaIn September of 2015, this site near Los Angeles became a major industrial accident. This is one of the well pads at the Aliso Canyon Natural Gas storage facility – a site that pumps natural gas into the ground and holds it so that it can later be shipped around the city. Starting in that September, one of the underground storage well paths ruptured, allowing large amounts of methane to leak upwards. That methane first leaked through the soil, then traveled up into the air. Communities near the leaking pad were evacuated after complaining of breathing problems, and the methane leak became one of California’s largest air pollution sources until it was finally plugged in February of 2016.The fact that the methane traveled through the soil created an unfortunate, if interesting, opportunity to do science. Methane is a major energy source for microbes – if they get ahold of methane, they can react that methane with oxygen in the atmosphere to generate energy. Starting in December 2015, a team from Victoria Orphan’s lab at the California Institute of Technology began sampling soil at the site to observe how the community of microbes in the soil changed when the soil suddenly was flooded with a new and ample energy source.Their team uses techniques that you might recognize from some of the best biology labs on Earth. After sampling soil at the site, they took cores back to their lab and counted the different species of bacteria living at the site to see how they changed when the methane leak was present. They then processed those samples to see what specific organisms and metabolisms could be recognized, and in fact they appear to have identified bacteria that could process the methane into energy using a never-before-studied enzyme.Natural gas leaks around the world can send methane – a potent greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere. Understanding the different organisms that can consume methane allows researchers to better understand the global methane budget. Methane abundances in the atmosphere have increased rapidly in recent years and therefore figuring out the metabolic pathways that life uses to consume methane is a major part of figuring out how to manage this gas on the ground.-JBBImage credit: Earthworkshttps://flic.kr/p/BrHJiZReference:http://www.caltech.edu/news/lessons-aliso-canyon-53317 -- source link

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