By Sid Perkins
Vast stores of methane gas lie buried beneath the seafloor, yet little escapes from the sediments into the ocean and the atmosphere above. Geochemists have long suspected that methane-munching microbes gobble the gas before it can seep upward out of the ooze. But scientists had been at a loss to explain how a microorganism could consume methane where oxygen is in short supply, as it is in the sediments.
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As it turns out, not one microbe but two probably work as a tag team to feed off the methane. A group of researchers studying methane-bearing sediments collected off the coast of Oregon has discovered aggregates of two fundamentally different microorganisms, which appear to be collaborating to consume the gas. Led by Antje Boetius, a microbiologist at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, the scientists report their findings in the Oct. 5 Nature.