Department Environmental Chemistry

Understanding the impact of human activities on the metabolic state of soil and aquatic environments is of paramount importance to implement measures for maintaining ecosystem services and sustainable access to food, water, and energy. However, ecosystem functioning under anthropogenic impact is difficult to define.

In this project, we explore variations of natural abundance oxygen isotope ratios in phosphate as new proxies for the holistic assessment of metabolic activity. Given the crucial importance of phosphoryl transfer reactions in fundamental biological processes, we hypothesize that changes of natural abundance ^₁₈O/^₁₆O ratios in phosphate also reflect shifts in the metabolic state of the environmental microbiome as a response to natural and man-made perturbations.

While variations in ^₁₈O/^₁₆O ratios of phosphate are observed in nature, the biochemical processes of the phosphorus metabolism responsible for these phenomena are not understood. Here, we characterize the biochemical pathways responsible for phosphorus metabolism in microorganisms through metabolic flux analyses and evaluate how perturbations affect the observable oxygen isotope ratios in cytosolic phosphate which we will quantify using novel approaches for high-resolution Orbitrap mass spectrometry.