A recent genomic study of coral reef fish by scientists from the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) and the Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment (ICBM) at the University of Oldenburg has found previously undescribed microorganisms in the fish gills that can carry out a wide variety of metabolic functions. Most prevalent among them was a novel lineage of proteobacteria with chemosynthetic potential, which is the ability to fix carbon dioxide using energy produced by the oxidation of inorganic compounds.The study has just been published in the journal PLOS Genetics.