Earth and Life have coevolved over time, influencing each other’s evolutionary trajectory and ultimately keeping our planet habitable for the last 4 billion years. Microorganisms in the environment play a large role in mediating the interactions between Earth’s geosphere and biosphere, controlling a large portion of the cycle of elements and nutrients. The majority of the key microbial chemical reactions that control the cycle of elements are carried out by a small set of proteins containing a redox-sensitive transition metal as their core catalytic center. Elements used include, among others, transition metals such as Fe, Mo, W, Zn, Cu, V, Mn, Ni and Co and non-metals like S and Mg. The availability of these metals is largely controlled by abiotic reactions in diverse ecosystems, and it has changed over the course of Earth’s history as a result of changing redox conditions, particularly global oxygenation. Empirical data from diverse fields suggest that the availability of transition metals can influence the type of microbial communities, and in turn their ecosystem functions, found in different ecosystems. Despite this, there is a lack of fundamental knowledge on distribution and availability of transition metals in controlling microbial diversity. COEVOLVE will elucidate the impact of transition metal availability on microbial functional diversity, combining fieldwork, laboratory experiments, and computational approaches. COEVOLVE will: 1) investigate the relationship between the availability of trace metals and microbial functional diversity in extant ecosystems and organisms; 2) link metabolic diversity and metal availability to different geological, geochemical, and mineralogical conditions; 3) link metabolic diversity and dependence on metal availability to the emergence and evolution of different metabolisms; and 4) determine the timing of major steps in metabolic evolution and link them to geochemical proxies of planetary surface redox change. Understanding the role of trace metal environmental distribution and availability in influencing microbial functional diversity might hold the key to understanding the co-evolution of Life and Planet Earth, unlocking a number of important discoveries at the core of diverse fields such as earth sciences, astrobiology, microbial ecology, and biotechnology.
