Draft 4/26

This was a talk I recently attended. I enjoyed this talk and believe that it may have many environmental applications. The talk was about methanotrophs that live in lake Washington. These methanotrophs live in the sediment of the lake right at the bottom of the zone of oxygen diffusion. One thing that was focused on was the use of rare Earth metals in the energy production of methanotrophs. Little is known about these methanotrophs and how they methane to methanol. However from the findings of this study it seems like methanotrophs may be a viable solution to reducing methane sinks around the globe. The way that these methanotrophs were tested was by first obtaining samples from lake Washington. In this lake alone over 60 isolates have been identified in the area of sediment just where there is little oxygen that has diffused down. To map the respiration of the methanotrophs a full flux map was created. Bacterial cells were exposed to formaldehyde to see if they could continue respiration. Next components of the respiration pathway of methanotrophs were upregulated and downregulated by providing the methanotrophs with different compounds. This was used to test the effect that Lanthanides have on methanotroph respiration. Additionally the importance of a co-culture was tested by keeping methanotrophs and non-methanotrophs in the same and separate environments.