Arpita Bose
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Microbiology & Immunology
Methane is a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide, and much of the methane entering the atmosphere is made by microbes. The microbes that make it, methanogenic archaea, often cannot do the job alone: they depend on partner organisms to hand them the carbon and electrons they need.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Biology
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
methanogenesis
methanogenic archaea
phototrophic bacteria
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Characterize how a phototrophic bacterium and a methanogenic archaeon grow together as a syntrophic pair, defining the co-metabolic activities each partner contributes under anoxic conditions.
- Determine the mechanisms of interspecies electron transfer by which electrons move from the light-harvesting bacterium to the methane-producing archaeon.
- Test the hypothesis that this phototroph-methanogen syntrophy can drive light-dependent methanogenesis from carbon dioxide or waste organic carbon sources.
- Investigate how the partnership influences the nitrogen cycle through nitrogen fixation, the conversion of nitrogen gas into usable form.
More about the research
Understanding those partnerships matters both for predicting where environmental methane comes from and for the prospect of running the reaction deliberately, turning carbon dioxide or waste organic carbon into fuel.
Why it matters
Microbial partnerships are a major source of atmospheric methane, so describing how a phototroph feeds a methanogen helps explain where environmental methane originates and improves the basis for greenhouse gas accounting. The same chemistry, if controlled, could support engineered communities that sequester carbon dioxide or convert waste organic carbon into methane fuel using sunlight.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Ruggero Rossi
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Engineering·Early-career
Uncover the regulatory mechanisms that set how fast nitrogen-fixing bacteria make ammonia under outside electrochemical stimulation, using experiments that link nitrogen fixation to electroactivity (electron exchange with an electrode).
Shawn Fraver
University of Maine, ME·Earth & Environmental Science
Identify how methanogens (methane-producing microbes) and methanotrophs (methane-consuming microbes) in Howland Forest soils drive methane flux across moisture and other environmental gradients, using microbial community profiling.
Kylie Allen
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, VA·Microbiology & Immunology
Identify which metallochaperones bind and deliver nickel to each nickel-dependent enzyme in methanogenic archaea, using in vivo crosslinking to trap interacting proteins and quantitative proteomics to identify them.
The school
Washington University in St Louis: 97 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 365 research doctorates a year.
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