Deep Sea Sampling, Sample Work-up and Analysis
The deep sea is one of the largest and most remote environments on earth. Its biota remains still largely unknown because specific and highly technological procedures for exploration, sample collection and in situ experimentation have been developed only
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K. N. Timmis (ed.), Handbook of Hydrocarbon and Lipid Microbiology, DOI 10.1007/978-3-540-77587-4_266, # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 2010
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Deep Sea Sampling, Sample Work-up and Analysis
Abstract: The deep sea is one of the largest and most remote environments on earth. Its biota remains still largely unknown because specific and highly technological procedures for exploration, sample collection and in situ experimentation have been developed only in the last decades. It is now clear that getting suitable samples for studying ecosystems functioning or for achieving new biotechnological resources has necessarily to be driven by a multidisciplinary approach. Geological and geophysical surveys allow exploring the sites and identifying the candidate environmental niches to be sampled, while parallel geochemical and (micro)biological characterizations, possibly conducted in situ, pose the basis for the understanding of the geosphere-biosphere interactions, a fundamental step to recognize the ecological significance of the samples. Deep sea exploration and sample collection are always technologically challenging, due to the distance of the sampling site and its extreme conditions in term of pressure, temperature, salinity, absence of light, etc. Underwater technologies in the last decades provided the science community with high-tech devices like sensors, highpressure samplers and submarine vehicles that allow precise and high resolution sampling even in the most remote and harsh deep sea environments. Once a site of interest has been identified and the sample has been collected and transported at the surface, the immediate and adequate sample manipulation and processing is fundamental to preserve the biological material for reliable analytical measurements.
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Introduction
In the last 50 years, the perception of the deep sea changed from a uniform and biologically inert to a dynamic environment, rich in biodiversity. The advances that changed the paradigm have been permitted by the development of underwater technologies and instrumentations that allowed observing, mapping and sampling the highly diverse deep marine environments. In this chapter are reviewed the experimental strategies that can be exploited to access, explore and characterize geochemically and microbiologically at in situ conditions the deep sea in order to select the best ecological niches to be sampled. The main techniques for sample collection and on-board manipulation are then discussed in the light of the sampling strategy adopted.
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Site Access, Geological Survey and Geochemical Characterization
Studying the deep sea is dependent upon the availability of research vessels equipped with suitable instrumentations for geophysical surveys and underwater devices for detailed exploration. Geophysical surveys allow for the exploration of the environment from the sea surface and generally lead to the identification of the sites of interest and indicate the site accessibility for the sampling devices (Niemann et al., 2006). Nevertheless
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