A New Rate Law Describing Microbial Respiration
Qusheng Jin,Craig M. Bethke +1 more
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TLDR
The new rate law is significant because it affords the possibility of extrapolating in a rigorous manner from laboratory experiment to a broad range of natural conditions, including microbial growth where only limited energy is available.Abstract:
The rate of microbial respiration can be described by a rate law that gives the respiration rate as the product of a rate constant, biomass concentration, and three terms: one describing the kinetics of the electron-donating reaction, one for the kinetics of the electron-accepting reaction, and a thermodynamic term accounting for the energy available in the microbe's environment. The rate law, derived on the basis of chemiosmotic theory and nonlinear thermodynamics, is unique in that it accounts for both forward and reverse fluxes through the electron transport chain. Our analysis demonstrates how a microbe's respiration rate depends on the thermodynamic driving force, i.e., the net difference between the energy available from the environment and energy conserved as ATP. The rate laws commonly applied in microbiology, such as the Monod equation, are specific simplifications of the general law presented. The new rate law is significant because it affords the possibility of extrapolating in a rigorous manner from laboratory experiment to a broad range of natural conditions, including microbial growth where only limited energy is available. The rate law also provides a new explanation of threshold phenomena, which may reflect a thermodynamic equilibrium where the energy released by electron transfer balances that conserved by ADP phosphorylation.read more
Citations
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References
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TL;DR: Coupling of Phosphorylation to Electron and Hydrogen Transfer by a Chemi-Osmotic type of Mechanism is described.
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TL;DR: Evidence is presented substantiating the proposal that an internal tandem gene duplication event gave rise to a primordial MFS protein before divergence of the family members.
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Major Facilitator Superfamily
TL;DR: The major facilitator superfamily (MFS) is one of the two largest families of membrane transporters found on Earth as discussed by the authors, and all homologous MFS protein sequences in the public databases as of January 1997 were identified on the basis of sequence similarity.
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Soil microorganisms as controllers of atmospheric trace gases (H2, CO, CH4, OCS, N2O, and NO).
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