bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/536078; this version posted June 14, 2021. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. 1 Microbial metabolism and adaptations in Atribacteria-dominated methane hydrate sediments 2 Jennifer B. Glass1*, Piyush Ranjan2#, Cecilia B. Kretz§, Brook L. Nunn3, Abigail M. Johnson1, 3 Manlin Xu1, James McManus4, Frank J. Stewart2,5 4 5 1School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA; 6 2School of Biological Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA; 3Department 7 of Genome Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA; 4Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean 8 Sciences, East Boothbay, ME, USA; 5Department of Microbiology & Immunology, Montana State 9 University, Bozeman, MT, USA 10 11 *Corresponding Author:
[email protected] 12 13 #Now at: Michigan Medicine, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA; 14 §Now at: Association of Public Health Laboratories, Manager of Emerging and Zoonotic 15 Infectious Diseases, Silver Spring, MD, USA 16 17 Running Title: Atribacteria adaptions in methane hydrate ecosystem 18 Dedication: To Katrina Edwards 19 20 Originality-Significance Statement: This work provides insights into the metabolism and 21 adaptations of microbes that are ubiquitous and abundant in methane-rich ecosystems. Our findings 22 suggest that bacterial fermentation is a source of acetate for aceticlastic methanogenesis and a 23 driver of iron reduction in the metal reduction zone.