Geomicrobiology

In a study supported by collaboration between two research groups in the Faculty of Science’s Department of Biological Sciences, the team has furthered understanding of how microbes live in deep-sea sediments by ‘eating’ hydrocarbons naturally seeping from petroleum reservoirs beneath the seabed.

• Photo above: The study has real-world implications for the oil and gas industry, which analyzes petroleum seeps in exploring for deep-sea oil reservoirs. Also, these kinds of microbes could help naturally biodegrade a spill from a deep-water offshore oil well blowout. Photo courtesy Jayne Rattray

Their study combined cutting-edge biological tools — metagenomics and metabolomics — to characterize the poorly understood deep-sea bacteria and archaea (structurally similar to bacteria, but with a distinct evolutionary history) that biologists aren’t yet able to grow and study in the laboratory.

“We combined these tools in a very challenging environment,” says Dr. Casey Hubert, PhD, associate professor in biological sciences, and Campus Alberta Innovates Program (CAIP) chair, who leads the Geomicrobiology Research Group. “It enables us to better understand, in a comprehensive way, deep-sea petroleum systems and petroleum-associated micro-organisms that are difficult to get to and hard to sample.”

The study has real-world implications for the oil and gas industry, which analyzes petroleum seeps in exploring for deep-sea oil reservoirs. Also, these kinds of microbes could help naturally biodegrade a spill from a deep-water offshore oil well blowout.

The team’s multidisciplinary study, “Metabolic Potential of Uncultured Bacteria and Archaea Associated with Petroleum Seepage in Deep-Sea Sediments,” was recently published in the journal Nature Communications.