Investigating the Limits of Arsenic Methylation in the Critical Zone

GSTDTAP

项目编号	1625317
	Investigating the Limits of Arsenic Methylation in the Critical Zone
	Scott Maguffin
主持机构	Maguffin Scott
项目开始年	2016
	2016-09-01
项目结束日期	2018-08-31
资助机构	US-NSF
项目类别	Fellowship
项目经费	87000(USD)
国家	美国
语种	英语
英文摘要	Dr. Scott Maguffin has been granted an NSF EAR Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out research and education plans at Cornell University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Dale Bumpers National Rice Research Center. The goal of this project is to understand the process of arsenic bonding with organic compounds in the critical zone and limiting its mobility. Dr. Maguffin will use a combination of approaches, including geochemistry and environmental microbiology, to study arsenic-contaminated rice paddy soils. This research will complement ongoing efforts at the USDA Dale Bumpers Center to understand and mitigate arsenic uptake by rice plants. Insights into soil-mediated drivers of arsenic-organic compounds interactions will contribute to an integrated understanding of how soil-plant-microbe interactions regulate the bioavailability and toxicity of arsenic in rice paddy soils. Results from this study will also have implications for development of biovolatilization as a soil and groundwater remediation tool, since several forms of arsenic-organic compounds species are volatile. The research results will be shared through a joint seminar at the Dale Bumpers Center. Undergraduate students will have the opportunity to participate in the research, and outreach events related to arsenic in water and food will be organized, ensuring a high level of student and community engagement with this project and the field of arsenic biogeochemistry. Arsenic methylation, a microbial detoxification process in which microbes catalyze the formation of a family of methylated arsenic species, significantly changes the toxicity, mobility, and fate of arsenic in the critical zone. The working hypothesis for this study is that microbially-driven demethylation competes with methylation to return arsenic to inorganic forms, and thus acts as a "cryptic" process that suppresses the accumulation of methylated arsenic in the environment. The investigation will use laboratory experiments to characterize the methylation potential of microbial communities from the different ecosystems through molecular biomarker analyses of microbial abundance and activity, as well as through chemical analyses. Functional gene analyses with newly designed "universal" arsM primers will produce a new level of knowledge of the diversity, abundance, and activity of As-methylating microbes in critical zone environments with different geochemical properties.
来源学科分类	Geosciences - Earth Sciences
文献类型	项目
条目标识符	http://119.78.100.173/C666/handle/2XK7JSWQ/70207
专题	环境与发展全球科技态势
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	Scott Maguffin.Investigating the Limits of Arsenic Methylation in the Critical Zone.2016.