Summary
Microbial energy and mass transfers have profound ecological and biogeochemical consequences, yet the controls directing microbial metabolic trade-offs remain poorly understood. The proposed project will study metabolic shifts in energy and mass transfers by microorganisms living through some of the earliest-evolving metabolisms known on Earth. By focusing efforts towards microbes driving primary production anaerobically with molecular hydrogen — through a metabolic process known as chemosynthesis — the project will test whether metabolic trade-offs can be predicted as a function of (i) growth
