Abstract
BackgroundThe Uzon Caldera is one of the places on our planet with unique geological, ecological, and microbiological characteristics. Uzon oil is the youngest on Earth. Uzon oil has unique composition, with low proportion of heavy fractions and relatively high content of saturated hydrocarbons. Microbial communities of the «oil site» have a diverse composition and live at high temperatures (up to 97 °C), significant oscillations of Eh and pH, and high content of sulfur, sulfides, arsenic, antimony, and mercury in water and rocks.ResultsThe study analyzed the composition, structure and unique genetics characteristics of the microbial communities of the oil site, analyzed the metabolic pathways in the communities. Metabolic pathways of hydrocarbon degradation by microorganisms have been found. The study found statistically significant relationships between geochemical parameters, taxonomic composition and the completeness of metabolic pathways. It was demonstrated that geochemical parameters determine the structure and metabolic potential of microbial communities.ConclusionsThere were statistically significant relationships between geochemical parameters, taxonomic composition, and the completeness of metabolic pathways. It was demonstrated that geochemical parameters define the structure and metabolic potential of microbial communities. Metabolic pathways of hydrocarbon oxidation was found to prevail in the studied communities, which corroborates the hypothesis on abiogenic synthesis of Uzon hydrothermal petroleum.
Highlights
The Uzon Caldera is one of the places on our planet with unique geological, ecological, and microbiological characteristics
Microbial communities of the oil site live at high temperatures, significant oscillations of Eh and pH, and high content of sulfides, arsenic, antimony, and mercury in water and rocks
Our Next generation sequencing (NGS) approach yielded over 300,000 sequences longer than 250 bp, which is similar to that found in other microbial communities of the Uzon Caldera [33, 40] and other geothermal ecosystems [68, 69]
Summary
The Uzon Caldera is one of the places on our planet with unique geological, ecological, and microbiological characteristics. Uzon oil has unique composition, with low proportion of heavy fractions and relatively high content of saturated hydrocarbons. The caldera of the Uzon Volcano (Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia) is a region with active hydrothermal activity, which contains outlets of unique natural hydrothermal petroleum [1, 2]. The Uzon petroleum is the youngest on Earth, with initial estimates at 1000 years [6], and later found to be only 50 years old [7]. The composition of the Uzon oil was investigated in several studies [6, 8,9,10,11,12] It belongs to the methane– naphtene–aromatic type [10], i.e., heavy low-tar petroleum with the prevalence of hydrocarbons. There is twice as more saturated hydrocarbons (57–58%) than aromatic ones (30–32%), with only 10–13% of tar and asphaltene components, and less than 0.3% of asphaltens [12]
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