Abstract
Tracing of biogeochemical pathways using molecular approaches has advanced our basic understanding of the carbon cycle and life’s legacy in the sedimentary record. To this end, compound-specific radiocarbon analysis has been instrumental in shedding light on the turnover, age, and sources of a range of biomarkers embedded within complex environmental matrices. However, despite their foundational importance for life and their omnipresence throughout geologic space and time, the biogeochemical cycling of amino acids remains largely unexplored. Here, we discuss the potential of using amino acid-specific radiocarbon to deepen our knowledge of the biogeochemistry of food webs and sedimentary organic carbon.
Highlights
The “building blocks of life” constitute a common foundation which all life on Earth shares and depends on (Miller and Urey, 1959; Kitadai and Maruyama, 2018) and amino acids are one of the largest pools of characterizable organic matter found in sedimentary environments (Trask, 1936; Degens, 1970; Lee et al, 1983; Wakeham et al, 1997; Hedges et al, 2001)
We share our perspectives on how amino acid-specific radiocarbon
Catalyzed by recent advances in accelerator mass spectrometry enabling the routine analysis of small-scale radiocarbon measurements (McIntyre et al, 2017), methods have been developed to investigate amino acid-specific radiocarbon in soft tissue of organisms opening a new frontier in research possibilities (Ishikawa et al, 2018)
Summary
Tracing of biogeochemical pathways using molecular approaches has advanced our basic understanding of the carbon cycle and life’s legacy in the sedimentary record. To this end, compound-specific radiocarbon analysis has been instrumental in shedding light on the turnover, age, and sources of a range of biomarkers embedded within complex environmental matrices. Compound-specific radiocarbon analysis has been instrumental in shedding light on the turnover, age, and sources of a range of biomarkers embedded within complex environmental matrices Despite their foundational importance for life and their omnipresence throughout geologic space and time, the biogeochemical cycling of amino acids remains largely unexplored.
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