Microbiologists show that methanogenic archaea do not always need to form methane to survive. It is possible to bypass methanogenesis with the seemingly simpler and more environmentally friendly ...

In nature, methanogens acquire electrons from hydrogen and other molecules that form during the breakdown of organic material or bacterial fermentation. "These small molecules are food for the ...

Methanogens, of course! What are methanogens? Put simply, methanogens are a diverse member of anaerobic microbes (organisms) that are found in anaerobic environments, such as the guts of animals, ...

To produce methane, methanogens can use methylated compounds such as acetate or methanol as substrates or just carbon dioxide (CO 2) and hydrogen gas (H 2). In fact, the methanogens’ use of H 2 leads ...

Rumen methanogens are major sources of anthropogenic methane emissions, and these archaea are targets in strategies aimed at reducing methane emissions. Here we show that the poorly characterised ...

Still, current data suggests gut archaea are not as varied as their bacterial neighbors. “We made a census of the diversity of methanogens in the gut, and we found around 30 species, which is not a ...

Methanogens: A Third Branch of Life By Science News Magazine Issue: Vol. 112 No. #20, November 12, 1977 Having trouble viewing this? Open in a new window Questions or comments on this article?

In this reaction the energy of a pair of electrons is split, so that one electron becomes more strongly reducing at the expense of the other. It was assumed that methanogens transfer the high-energy ...

Dimitry Sorokin, a microbial ecologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, and his colleagues showed previously that the sediment in soda lakes in southern Siberia contained DNA with two ...

However, methanogens seem to be a potential candidate for what life on Mars might look like — they produce methane and live in harsh, anaerobic environments, such as the guts of animals, in deep ...