BioProject

This project is highly relevant to the DOE Missions of global carbon cycling and sequestration and biogeochemistry. More...

This project is highly relevant to the DOE Missions of global carbon cycling and sequestration and biogeochemistry. Methanotrophy is an essential component of the global carbon cycle and represents the largest biological sink for methane. The vast global expansion of agricultural and urban environments has led to an imbalance in the methane budget. N-saturation of soils caused by fertilizer use and deposition of nitrogenous air pollutants greatly diminishes methanotrophic activity as ammonia is a competitive inhibitor of MMO enzymes. Agricultural runoff into estuaries and coastal areas impacts methanotrophy to an as yet unquantified degree. Lessening of methanotrophic activity necessarily results in a loss of carbon sequestration as methane is released to the atmosphere rather than remaining in microbial biomass. Molecular ecology studies focused on methanotrophic communities are just beginning to find correlations between community composition and physicochemical parameters. It is too early to speculate on how specific methanotrophic communities impact local, regional, landscape, and global carbon cycling, but access to genomic information on organisms from diverse ecosystems and postgenomic tools will greatly aid in understanding how the functional genomes of methanotrophs influence their relationships to and functions in the environment. Less...