Abstract
For decades, the conversion of organic nitrogen to dinitrogen gas by heterotrophic bacteria, termed heterotrophic denitrification, was assumed to be the main pathway of nitrogen loss in natural ecosystems. Recently, however, autotrophic bacteria have been shown to oxidize ammonium in the absence of oxygen, yielding dinitrogen gas. This process, termed anammox, accounts for over 50% of nitrogen loss in marine ecosystems1,2,3,4,5. However, the significance of anammox in freshwater ecosystems has remained uncertain6,7. Here, we report the occurrence of anammox hotspots at land–freshwater interfaces of lake riparian zones in North China, using molecular and isotopic tracing technologies. Laboratory incubations measuring anammox activity at substrate concentrations no more than 10% of those observed in situ yielded some of the highest potential activities reported for natural environments to date. Potential rates of anammox peaked in sediments sampled from the interface between land and water, as did the abundance of annamox bacteria. Scaling our findings up to the entire lake system, we estimate that interfacial anammox hotspots account for the loss of 103 g Nm−2 yr−1 from this lake region, and around one fifth of the nitrogen lost from the land–water interface.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank M. Yang, J. He, Y. Mu and J. Liu for their help, and J. Guo and B. Qu for discussions. This research is financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 21077119), Knowledge Innovation Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (KZCX2-EW-410-01), and special fund of State Key Joint Laboratory of Environment Simulation and Pollution Control (12L03ESPC). Moreover, G.Z. gratefully acknowledges the support of the Beijing Nova Program (2011095) and K.C. Wong Education Foundation, Hong Kong. The anammox research of Mike Jetten is supported by ERC Advanced Grant 232937 and the 2012 Spinoza Prize of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). N.R-P. is funded by the German Max Planck Society and the Danish National Research Foundation.
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The project was conceived and led by G.Z. and C.Y. S.W., W.W., Y.W., L.Z., B.J. and G.Z. contributed to the sample analysis. G.Z. wrote the paper and all co-authors substantially contributed by commenting upon and revising it.
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Zhu, G., Wang, S., Wang, W. et al. Hotspots of anaerobic ammonium oxidation at land–freshwater interfaces. Nature Geosci 6, 103–107 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1683
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1683
