The 'sleeping' biosphere - endospores in deep marine sediments

深层生物圈是地球科学中一个重要的新领域，而地球深层地下可能存在着最大的原核生物生物量，这一点令人惊讶，但仍然存在争议。这激起了广泛的兴趣，并在《自然》和《科学》上发表了一系列论文，以及广泛的媒体和公众兴趣。该项目将通过量化和调查原核生物孢子的作用来调查深层生物圈研究的一个新方面，原核孢子可能占以前在深层沉积物中检测到的细胞的很大比例。由于它们没有表现出可检测到的新陈代谢，大量孢子的存在可能有助于解释生物圈深处有大量细胞而可用的能量很少的悖论。因此，这项研究将与以前的深部生物圈研究具有相同的广泛兴趣。

The Deep Biosphere is a major new area in Geosciences and the presence of possibly the largest prokaryotic biomass on Earth being in the deep subsurface is both astonishing and still controversial. This has fuelled wide interest and a string of papers in Nature and Science, as well as wide press and public interest. This project will investigate a new aspect of deep biosphere research by quantifying and investigating the role of prokaryotic spores, which could represent a very significant proportion of previously detected cells in deep sediments. As they do not show detectable metabolism, the presence of large number of spores could help to explain the paradox of large numbers of cells in the deep biosphere while only very little energy is available. Thus this research will have the same broad interest as previous Deep Biosphere studies.