Microbial processes in iron-rich sediments of Lake Towuti, Indonesia: Disentangling the methane and iron cycles

Sampling

Lake Towuti is a ferruginous basin with anoxic conditions below 130 m water depth. Due to these special settings, the lake is ideal to study early diagenesis in iron-rich sediments such as those that generated ancient iron formations during the Archean and Proterozoic. We investigated microbial populations present in the sediments, their role in iron cycle and any cryptic link to other elements. For this purpose, we worked on samples from short cores that were retrieved from Lake Towuti by our scientific team from the German Research Centre for Geosciences (Potsdam, Germany) and the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada). This project was supported by the ICDP priority program of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft through grants to Jens Kallmeyer (KA 2293/8-1) and Aurèle Vuillemin (VU 94/1-1); the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant no. P2GEP2_148621 to Aurèle Vuillemin); the German Research Centre for Geosciences through an expedition grant to Jens Kallmeyer and Dirk Wagner; and an Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Discovery grant (no. 0487) to Sean A. Crowe.

Method steps

1. Pipeline used: https://www.ebi.ac.uk/metagenomics/pipelines/4.1