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We may find deep-sea microbes resting in tombs they built themselves

Featured Image: Alvin – a submersible Human Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) designed to allow data collection at depths up to 6,500 m below the ocean surface. Featured image courtesy of John Magyar, Caltech.

Paper: Microbially induced precipitation of silica by anaerobic methane-oxidizing consortia and implications for microbial fossil preservation

Authors: Daniela Osorio-Rodriguez, Kyle S. Metcalfe, Shawn E. McGlynn, Hang Yu, Anne E. Dekas, Mark Ellisman, Tom Deerinck, Ludmilla Aristilde, John P. Grotzinger, and Victoria J. Orphan

Maybe one weekend in your life, you found yourself piling into an SUV at 6 AM with seven other students, intermittently registering the drone of an overenthusiastic geology professor whose course you took to fulfill a degree requirement. If so, in that vehicle, the proclamation that “the present is the key to the past” was certainly uttered. A recent study conducted by Daniela Osorio-Rodriguez and collaborators epitomizes the power of those words.

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To P, not to P? That is (an oversimplification of) the biogeochemical question—

Paper: Unraveling biogeochemical phosphorus dynamics in hyperarid Mars‐analogue soils using stable oxygen isotopes in phosphate

Authors: Jianxun Shen, Andrew C. Smith, Mark W. Claire, Aubrey L. Zerkle

Many geologists believe that ancient Mars, with its warmer temperatures and water-rich environment, may have been home to life. To test this hypothesis, astrobiologists must find signifiers of life that can survive the billions of years of hyperaridity experienced on the Martian surface. One such method could be identifying biotic alteration of the geochemical cycling of phosphorus, as was highly publicized during the recent discovery of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus. Researchers have taken the first step in this search by characterizing biological phosphorus cycling in the analog environment of the Atacama Desert – an endeavor that has applied novel techniques in chemistry to provide insights about the movement of phosphorus in arid environments.

Continue reading “To P, not to P? That is (an oversimplification of) the biogeochemical question—”