ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2025
Metabolic controls on the carbon isotope fractionations of bacterial fermentation.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Decomposition-Induced Change in Stranded Megafauna: Decoupling Postmortem Impacts from the Isotopic Niche.Environmental science & technology · 2026Article
- Shifts in ruminant fermentation during inhibition of methanogenesis are reflected in the isotope compositions of volatile fatty acids.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2026Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Microbial fermentation facilitates the initial breakdown of organic matter into small molecules and is thought to be the rate-limiting step of anoxic organic mineralization. However, fermentation is understudied in modern and ancient biogeochemistry due to a lack of environmental biomarkers. It has long been assumed that fermentation, like respiration, does not express significant carbon isotope fractionations, precluding isotopic signals as a means of studying it in nature. Here, we tested this idea by growing pure cultures of four fermenting bacteria on glucose and measuring the carbon isotope compositions of the organic acids and alcohols produced. We found that fermentation exhibits a strong carbon isotope fractionation, ranging from [Formula: see text]6‰ to [Formula: see text]16‰, depending on the fermentation product. With bioisotopic models that track site-specific isotope enrichments through metabolism, we constrained the enzymes responsible for these fractionations. Our models reproduced in vivo organic acid [Formula: see text] values in all four organisms. These findings demonstrate that acetate
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