Project description
Study explores how anthropogenic activities spur organisms to produce more methane
Every day, an increasing number of mineral particles are discharged to the natural environment from industry, agriculture and other anthropogenic activities. This mineral discharge could deliver electrically conductive particles to various water environments. Previous research has shown that certain microbial interactions between different species strictly depend on such conductive particles, which lead to higher rates of methane production. The EU-funded MIMET project will study how microorganisms interact with conductive particles and how the latter affect the methane cycle in water environments. Researchers plan expeditions to Mediterranean regions and the Arctic that are likely to host great amounts of electrically conductive particles.
Objective
This proposal aims to gain a fundamental understanding of the impact of anthropogenic conductive particles on methane emissions. We recently showed that conductive particles are vital for the interspecies cross-feeding of a methane-producing consortium from the Baltic Sea. Previous to that, we showed that conductive particles accelerate methane production in synthetic dual-species consortia that typically function via direct electron transfer. Others showed that conductive particles may also stimulate anaerobic methane oxidation. For the latter, the reports are scarce and contradictory. It is mysterious how microorganisms interact with the conductive particles and how conductive particles affect the methane cycle in the environment. These knowledge gaps we will study here. We will use synthetic consortia, enriched environmental consortia, and whole sediment cores. We will identify marker genes for microbe-particle contacts by combining expression studies with targeted gene-deletion and physicochemical cell surface studies. The marker genes we can then use to track similar microbe-conductive particle associations in the environment. We will examine the link between increased anthropogenic particle input and methane emissions in environments from the Mediterranean to the Arctic where higher particle input is likely. I expect to deliver fundamental knowledge about the microorganisms involved in methane transformations by anthropogenically derived conductive particles.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- natural scienceschemical scienceselectrochemistryelectrolysis
- natural scienceschemical sciencesorganic chemistryaliphatic compounds
You need to log in or register to use this function
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
5230 Odense M
Denmark