ArticleScientific reports2017
Microbial turnover times in the deep seabed studied by amino acid racemization modelling.
Article in Scientific reports, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers.
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Who cites it
35 citing papers in PubMed, 67 citations in OpenAlex.
- The chemistry of habitable oceans in the Solar system.Nature communications · 2026Review
- Surface sediment microbial communities remain viable, culturable, and metabolically active during sequential heating.Frontiers in microbiology · 2026Article
- Dissolved inorganic carbon supports robust anabolism and methanogenesis in actively serpentinizing rocks.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- The Deep Subsurface Biosphere and its Substrates Along a One-Million-Year Ferruginous Lake Archive.Microbial ecology · 2025Article
- Amino acids could sustain fungal life in the energy-limited anaerobic sediments below the seafloor.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2024Article
- Single-cell analysis reveals an active and heterotrophic microbiome in the Guaymas Basin deep subsurface with significant inorganic carbon fixation by heterotrophs.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2024Article
- Secondary production and priming reshape the organic matter composition in marine sediments.Science advances · 2024Article
- Extremely oligotrophic and complex-carbon-degrading microaerobic bacteria from Arabian Sea oxygen minimum zone sediments.Archives of microbiology · 2024Article
- Slow closure of Earth's carbon cycle.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Article
- Cell-specific rates of sulfate reduction and fermentation in the sub-seafloor biosphere.Frontiers in microbiology · 2023Article
- Is biofilm formation intrinsic to the origin of life?Environmental microbiology · 2023Article
- Catabolic protein degradation in marine sediments confined to distinct archaea.The ISME journal · 2022Article
- Active anaerobic methane oxidation and sulfur disproportionation in the deep terrestrial subsurface.The ISME journal · 2022Article
- Sources and Fluxes of Organic Carbon and Energy to Microorganisms in Global Marine Sediments.Frontiers in microbiology · 2022Article
- Sampling across large-scale geological gradients to study geosphere-biosphere interactions.Frontiers in microbiology · 2022Article
- Evolutionary stasis of a deep subsurface microbial lineage.The ISME journal · 2021Article
- Article
- Evidence for a Growth Zone for Deep-Subsurface Microbial Clades in Near-Surface Anoxic Sediments.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2020Article
- Widespread energy limitation to life in global subseafloor sediments.Science advances · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
The study of active microbial populations in deep, energy-limited marine sediments has extended our knowledge of the limits of life on Earth. Typically, microbial activity in the deep biosphere is calculated by transport-reaction modelling of pore water solutes or from experimental measurements involving radiotracers. Here we modelled microbial activity from the degree of D:L-aspartic acid racemization in microbial necromass (remains of dead microbial biomass) in sediments up to ten million years old. This recently developed approach (D:L-amino acid modelling) does not require incubation experiments and is highly sensitive in stable, low-activity environments. We applied for the first time newly established constraints on several important input parameters of the D:L-amino acid model, such as a higher aspartic acid racemization rate constant and a lower cell-specific carbon content of sub-seafloor microorganisms. Our model results show that the pool of necromass amino acids is turned over by microbial activity every few thousand years, while the turnover times of vegetative cells are in the order of years to decades. Notably, microbial turnover times in million-year-old sediment from the Peru Margin are up to 100-fold shorter than previous estimates, highlighting the influence of microbial activities on element cycling over geologic time scales.
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