ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
A unified theory for organic matter accumulation.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- How much do zooplankton and fine-scale processes matter for the ocean biological pump?Nature communications · 2026Article
- Contrasting salinity regimes reshape microbe-DOM coupling and reduce recalcitrant dissolved organic carbon preservation in a salt lake.The ISME journal · 2026Article
- Unveiling ongoing biogeochemical dynamics of CDOM from surface to deep ocean.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Improved maximum growth rate prediction from microbial genomes by integrating phylogenetic information.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Respiratory quotients of particle-associated microbes track carbon flux attenuation in the mesopelagic Southern Ocean.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Ecological dynamics explain modular denitrification in the ocean.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- What Is the Molecular Weight of "High" Molecular Weight Dissolved Organic Matter?Environmental science & technology · 2024Article
- Disentangling drivers of mudflat intertidal DOM chemodiversity using ecological models.Nature communications · 2024Article
- The microbial carbon pump and climate change.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2024Review
- Slow closure of Earth's carbon cycle.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Dominant heterocyclic composition of dissolved organic nitrogen in the ocean: A new paradigm for cycling and persistence.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Functional convergence in slow-growing microbial communities arises from thermodynamic constraints.The ISME journal · 2023Article
- Fungal parasitism on diatoms alters formation and bio-physical properties of sinking aggregates.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Identification of microbial metabolic functional guilds from large genomic datasets.Frontiers in microbiology · 2023Article
- Single-cell measurements and modelling reveal substantial organic carbon acquisition by Prochlorococcus.Nature microbiology · 2022Article
- Historical contingencies and phage induction diversify bacterioplankton communities at the microscale.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Deep ocean microbial communities produce more stable dissolved organic matter through the succession of rare prokaryotes.Science advances · 2022Article
- Linking Microbial Population Succession and DOM Molecular Changes inMicrobiology spectrum · 2022Article
- Microbial metabolites in the marine carbon cycle.Nature microbiology · 2022Review
- Unifying chemical and biological perspectives of carbon accumulation in the environment.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
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3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Organic matter constitutes a key reservoir in global elemental cycles. However, our understanding of the dynamics of organic matter and its accumulation remains incomplete. Seemingly disparate hypotheses have been proposed to explain organic matter accumulation: the slow degradation of intrinsically recalcitrant substrates, the depletion to concentrations that inhibit microbial consumption, and a dependency on the consumption capabilities of nearby microbial populations. Here, using a mechanistic model, we develop a theoretical framework that explains how organic matter predictably accumulates in natural environments due to biochemical, ecological, and environmental factors. Our framework subsumes the previous hypotheses. Changes in the microbial community or the environment can move a class of organic matter from a state of functional recalcitrance to a state of depletion by microbial consumers. The model explains the vertical profile of dissolved organic carbon in the ocean and connects microbial activity at subannual timescales to organic matter turnover at millennial timescales. The threshold behavior of the model implies that organic matter accumulation may respond nonlinearly to changes in temperature and other factors, providing hypotheses for the observed correlations between organic carbon reservoirs and temperature in past earth climates.
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