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Sugar turns brown algae into good carbon stores by Staff Writers Bremen, Germany (SPX) May 27, 2020
You may like them or not, but almost everyone knows them: brown algae such as Fucus vesiculosus, commonly known as bladderwrack, grow along the entire German coast. Giant kelp like Macrocystis or Sargassum grow closely together along the coasts but can also form floating aggregates that can cover the Atlantic from west to east. Some ecologists see this this very productive ecosystem as a marine counterpart to rainforests on land. In these algal forests, large amounts of carbon dioxide are stored, making them an important part of the global carbon cycle. Andreas Sichert from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology dedicated his PhD to the question how brown algae can be such a good sink of carbon: "Main constituents of algal biomass are their cell walls - a tight network of proteins and long-chained sugars. When the algae die, we actually have little clue about the fate of algal biomass in the ocean, for example which compounds are degraded fast or slowly".
Firm and flexible What role this sugar plays in the long degradation process of brown algae was analyzed by scientists from the research group Marine Glycobiology at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology and the MARUM, Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen. For their study, they cooperated with colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from the University of Greifswald and from the University of Vienna. "It was already known that microbial communities hydrolyze fucoidan slower than other algal polysaccharides and thus fucoidan might act as carbon sink" says Andreas Sichert from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, first author of the study, published in the scientific journal Nature Microbiology in May 2020. "Usually, polysaccharides are a favorite energy source for bacteria, but the reason why fucoidan should be barely digestible remained unclear".
Only specialists degrade this sugar "We could show that Lentimonas acquired a remarkably complex machinery for the degradation of fucoidan that uses about one hundred enzymes to liberate the sugar fucose - a part of fucoidan", says Jan-Hendrik Hehemann, leader of the research group Marine Glycobiology. "This is probably one of the most complicated biochemical degradation pathways for natural material that we know of." Fucose is then metabolized via a bacterial microcompartment, a proteinaceous shell that shields the cell from the toxic intermediate lactaldehyde. "The need for such a complex catabolic pathway underpins the recalcitrance of fucoidans for most marine bacteria and it shows that only highly specialized organisms in the ocean are able to break down this algal sugar," says Hehemann. "This can explain the slower turnover of the algal biomass in the environment and suggests that fucoidans sequester carbon in the ocean."
Potential for pharmacology
World can likely capture and store enough carbon dioxide to meet climate targets London, UK (SPX) May 22, 2020 The capture and storage of carbon dioxide (CO2) underground is one of the key components of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) reports on how to keep global warming to less than 2C above pre-industrial levels by 2100. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) would be used alongside other interventions such as renewable energy, energy efficiency, and electrification of the transportation sector. The IPCC used models to create around 1,200 technology scenarios whereby climate chang ... read more
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