Feast or famine? Bioinorganic chemistry and nutrient crises in Precambrian basins

GSTDTAP

项目编号	NE/M013014/1
	Feast or famine? Bioinorganic chemistry and nutrient crises in Precambrian basins
	[unavailable]
主持机构	University of Oxford
项目开始年	2015
	2015-07-01
项目结束日期	2018-06-30
资助机构	UK-NERC
项目类别	Research Grant
国家	英国
语种	英语
英文摘要	The history of early life on Earth is tightly coupled to evolving environmental conditions. Throughout Earths earliest history, atmospheric oxygen has fluctuated in ways that we are still trying to understand. These fluctuations would have strongly impacted biology in many different ways. Because biology requires several different chemical elements aside from carbon, the availability of these nutrients would have strongly controlled which ones were selected to perform crucial biological functions and at which time. The remnants of these early nutrients are left behind in the genomes of archaea, bacteria and eukaryotes today, providing tantalizing clues as to which elements were available and when. However, our knowledge of how bioessential elements were distributed in the early oceans is limited. This is mainly due to the fact that the sedimentary rocks that preserve such critical windows of Earth's history have experienced complex histories after they initially formed, essentially erasing the chemical clues that can help us answer some of these questions. This project has uncovered a mineral that is preserved in sedimentary rocks several billions of years old which captured critical information related to the availability of bioessential nutrients over time. Through laboratory synthesis work, we will understand how this mineral initially formed from seawater, which chemical elements enter its structure and in what proportions, and understand how these clues are preserved over geologic history. By selecting critical intervals of Earth's history where this mineral was formed in abundance, most notably in a unique sedimentary rock type called banded iron formation, we can reconstruct the nutrient availability of Earth's early oceans, directly testing hypotheses that relate biological evolution to environmental change.
来源学科分类	Natural Environment Research
文献类型	项目
条目标识符	http://119.78.100.173/C666/handle/2XK7JSWQ/85709
专题	环境与发展全球科技态势
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	[unavailable].Feast or famine? Bioinorganic chemistry and nutrient crises in Precambrian basins.2015.