Wensi Zhang's research while affiliated with Chinese Academy of Sciences and other places

... The geochemical parameters were recorded for 8 soil samples at each site, including organic matter (OM), total nitrogen (N), available nitrogen (IonN), available potassium (IonK), soluble salt (Ss), soil water (Sw), and pH. As shown in Table 1, all samples were slightly alkaline, with pH values ranging from 8.42 ± 0.13 to 8.90 ± 0.14, and had extremely low moisture content (0.189 ± 0.133 ~ 0.251 ± 0.044%), which was consistent with other dry deserts (Liu L. et al., 2022;Liu S. et al., 2022). The concentration of OM was higher at FM (7.875 ± 3.029 g/kg) than at KMTG (3.188 ± 1.208 g/kg) and TKS (3.625 ± 1.370 g/kg), resulting in a high microbial count at FM (198 ± 37 CFU), while a low microbial counts at KMTG (59 ± 24 CFU) and TKS (67 ± 9 CFU). ...

... Based on our knowledge of extant terrestrial life, it is therefore critical to understand what types of organisms might plausibly have inhabited, and co-evolved, in early Mars-like environments. Inspired by recent findings that MTB can adapt to different facets of Mars-like extreme environments [8][9][10], we suggest revisiting astrobiology research on MTB in the recognition of their biological survivability in Mars analog environments. ...

... Earth's near space exposure With multiple natural extreme conditions (extreme dryness, ionizing radiation, low temperature, and low atmospheric pressure), the lower near space of Earth serves as an excellent Mars-like setting to study the stress tolerance of MTB [56,57]. Intriguingly, after hours of exposure to the lower near space environment at 23 km, a considerable fraction (>12%) of the wildtype Magnetospirillum gryphiswaldense strain MSR-1 (MSR-1; isolated from freshwater sediments in the Ryck River, Germany) survived near space exposure [9]. ...

... For comparative genomic analysis, a total of seven representative Nitrospirota MTB genomes and three marine MTB genomes were obtained from the NCBI GenBank database. The identification, annotation, and visualization of magnetosome gene clusters (MGCs) were performed using MAGcluster (Ji et al., 2022) with manual inspection. ...

... To date, Nitrospirota MTB of high morphological and phylogenetic diversity have been widely reported in freshwater environments, and to a smaller extent in high temperature and acidic habitats (Spring et al., 1993;Flies et al., 2005;Lefèvre et al., 2010;Lin et al., 2011Lin et al., , 2012Lin et al., , 2020Uzun et al., 2020;Zhang et al., 2021). Because of the current inability to cultivate Nitrospirota MTB in laboratory settings, most of the physiological information on the phylum is speculation based on microscopic observations of cell ultrastructure combined with genetic information. ...

... The public datasets in which giant proteins were detected were from landfill leachate metagenomes (Grégoire et al. 2023), anaerobic digester sludge in the United States (Mei and Liu 2022) and China (Liu et al. 2021), lake water in Spain (Cabello-Yeves et al. 2022) and Finland (Buck et al. 2021), subsurface fracture fluids (Casar et al. 2021) in the United States, groundwater in New Zealand (Mosley et al. 2022) and Finland (Bell et al. 2022) , hydrocarbon field communities in Canada , Norwegian fjord waters (Suarez et al. 2022), river estuary sediment from China , magnetotactic enrichment communities (Lin et al. 2020), and a limonene enrichment from bog soil in Germany (Kizina et al. 2022). ...

... To obtain sufficient DNA for metagenomic sequencing, whole-genome amplification was carried out using the multiple displacement amplification technique with the Genomiphi V2 DNA Amplification Kit (GE Healthcare, United States). This approach has been widely used previously in various works (Kolinko et al., 2015;Monteil et al., 2019;Zhang et al., 2020b). The amplified DNA was purified by sodium acetate precipitation. ...

... TEM images of our magnetic extracts from WL-A showcase high morphological disparity of biogenic magnetite; several of these morphologies are similar to known taxa (Pósfai et al., 2013). Magnetofossils similar to magnetosomal magnetite produced by bacteria in the Proteobacteria, Nitrospirae, and candidate division OP3 phyla (potentially also from the Omnitrophica, Latescibacteria, and Planctomycetes phyla) suggest that microaerobic conditions were present for the duration of the CIE at the WL-A locality (Lefèvre, Viloria, et al., 2012;Lin, Zhang, et al., 2020;Mann, Frankel, & Blakemore, 1984;Pósfai et al., 2013). ...

... Magnetosome protein phylogeny largely mirrors that of organisms at or above the class or phylum level, which suggests that vertical inheritance followed by multiple independent MGC losses mainly drove bacterial evolution of magnetotaxis at higher taxonomic levels 23,25,31 . Subsequent evolutionary trajectories of magnetotaxis at lower taxonomic ranks appear to be much more complicated and multiple evolutionary processes including horizontal gene transfers, gene duplications and/or gene losses may have been involved [93][94][95] . Metagenomic sequences with similarity to known magnetosome genes have been found in the microbiomes of some animals and even humans, which might suggest that MTB sensed by their hosts may produce symbiotic magnetoreception in these organisms [96][97][98] . ...

... It was reported in 2012, that Pseudomonas sp., formed the iron nanoparticles of FezOofanaveragesizeof200nm [35,36].Inthecurrentstudy,theisolationofBaCillffSSffbtilisandPseud omonassp.showedthesameresponsestowardthemagnetashavingthemagnetosomes [37,38]. In the current study, the production of iron in culture media could be due to Bacillus sp. ...