The 'sleeping' biosphere - endospores in deep marine sediments

深层生物圈是地球科学的一个重要的新领域，在地下深处可能存在着地球上最大的原核生物，这既令人惊讶，也仍然存在争议。这引起了广泛的兴趣，在《自然》和《科学》上发表了一系列论文，也引起了广泛的新闻界和公众的兴趣。该项目将通过量化和研究原核孢子的作用来研究深层生物圈研究的一个新方面，原核孢子可能代表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的新陈代谢，大量孢子的存在可以帮助解释深层生物圈中大量细胞而只有很少能量可用的悖论。因此，这项研究将与以前的深层生物圈研究具有同样广泛的兴趣。

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.