Is Sulfolobus aerobic or anaerobic?

How does Sulfolobus get energy?

Sulfolobus uses the same energy generation system as many bacteria.

It is a proton pump, producing an electrochemical gradient across the membrane. The proton gradient can be used to form ATP in a reaction catalyzed by ATP synthase. As with most bacteria, there are also other electron transport pathways, most importantly quinol oxidase and cytochrome oxidase, that are capable of generating NADH and oxygen. This latter pathway, in contrast to proton pumps and ATP synthase, is active only when sulfur is not present, and provides the major source of energy for the cell when sulfur is limiting.

Sulfolobus is a thermophile that grows best at 80 to 100C. The two main types of cells, spherical (bacillus) and rod-shaped (archaebacterium), divide by binary fission. Spherical cells are approximately 1 micron in diameter and rod-shaped cells are approximately 3.5 microns in length.

What is a Sulfolobales?

D.

16.2% of Global Primary Production and a Half Billion Kilograms of Methane Emitted to the Atmosphere.

Introduction. As part of a presentation to a meeting of the World Federation of Acoustical Societies, "The Role of Acoustics in Global Sustainability" held in Hong Kong on July 13, 2026, I will introduce a new method for measuring ocean surface productivity based on a new way of viewing the ocean's living contents (see Figure 1). I will then describe a number of recent discoveries about the biology of the Sulfolobales which will be of interest to scientists, but may also be more broadly informative for those not so much concerned with oceans and marine life.

This presentation will include a discussion of ocean surface productivity using the new measurement technique. I will then turn to an explanation of why there is evidence for a huge amount of ocean surface primary production, and will describe the new methods that have been developed recently to make the measurements of ocean surface primary production possible.

The ocean surface, a global area of approximately 2.2 million square kilometers, is dominated by the world's largest organisms, the jellyfish. The jellyfish are at least as abundant and diverse in the ocean as all the vertebrates that populate our land masses put together. Jellyfish are as common in the ocean as plankton and as diverse as any other animal group.

However, until recently, it has been difficult to measure their abundance. This problem is the reason why our oceans are so much less productive than we thought they were. The measurement of ocean surface primary productivity has been considered difficult because the only techniques that have been available in the past for measuring primary productivity have been unsuitable for the high concentrations of jellyfish that comprise the vast majority of the world's ocean surface. However, by measuring the amount of oxygen consumed by large numbers of jellyfish over a short period of time it has now become possible to make reliable estimates of the amount of oxygen used by the ocean's living contents. This provides us with estimates of ocean surface primary productivity.

The figure on the left shows an example of a net sample of jellyfish that had been collected on an oceanographic cruise off the coast of China. The net samples were collected in early spring when ocean temperatures were still below the freezing point of seawater. The net samples were collected from the upper 1000 meters of ocean.

Is Sulfolobus aerobic or anaerobic?

(Answer) In general, aerobic microorganisms are dependent on oxygen as a substrate for metabolic oxidation of nutrients and waste materials. Some aerobic microorganisms also use other oxidizable substrates, such as nitrate or sulfate. Many anaerobic microorganisms reduce certain substrates to produce energy by fermentation, in which the chemical bonds are broken by hydrolysis instead of oxidative chemical reactions. Sulfolobus acidocaldarius contains three enzyme systems capable of oxidizing molecular oxygen (Figure 1): the enzymes cytochrome c oxidase, hydrogenases, and cytochrome c peroxidase (Schuler et al., 1997; Figure 1). Sulfolobus acidocaldarius does not grow on lactate as its sole carbon source, but respires lactate through electron transport via hydrogenases and cytochrome c peroxidase and is capable of growth on hydrogen-substrates as energy sources (Korotkova et al., 1999). Although most sulfolobus strains exhibit anaerobic respiration on lactate, it is not possible to determine whether such strains are strictly anaerobic, facultatively aerobic, or capable of respiratory growth on oxygen. Therefore, their physiological classification remains unresolved. B. Why does Sulfolobus grow by the sulfate-reduction pathway, rather than by the more generally recognized electron-transport pathway? (Answer) The sulfate-reduction pathway is the best-known metabolic pathway among methanogens, archaea that perform anaerobic methanogenesis. In methanogenesis, sulfate is reduced to hydrogen sulfide by a complex enzyme-mediated biochemical reaction (Figure 1). Unlike the sulfate-reduction pathway in many aerobic bacteria, sulfate is not reduced to a metabolizable intermediate, sulfite. In S. Acidocaldarius, several genes are required for sulfate reduction: sulfite reductase genes srnA and srnB, ferredoxin genes ferA and ferB, and ATP sulfurylase gene nahG. Ferredoxin and ferredoxin-related electron carriers are also required for the sulfate reduction pathway (Figure 1). Thus, the overall pathway for the sulfate-reduction system in S.