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Project Progress

Oxygen and sterol biosynthesis

The history of oxygen production and accumulation a first-order question for understanding Earth’s evolution and the development of complex life. Among the various geochemical proxies for the presence of O₂ in the environment, steroidal molecular fossils offer a unique record of O₂ where it was first produced and consumed by biology: in sunlit aquatic habitats. As steroid biosynthesis requires molecular oxygen, fossil steranes have been used to draw inferences about aerobiosis in the early Precambrian. However, better quantitative constraints on the O₂ requirement of this biochemistry would clarify the implications of these molecular fossils for environmental conditions at the time of their production. This year we demonstrated that steroid biosynthesis (Figure 1) is a microaerobic process, enabled by dissolved O₂ concentrations in the nanomolar range. We developed a model (Figure 2) showing that microaerobic marine environments, where steroid biosynthesis was possible, could have been widespread and persistent for long periods of time prior to the earliest geologic and isotopic evidence for atmospheric O₂. In the late Archean, molecular oxygen likely cycled as a biogenic trace gas, much as compounds such as dimethylsulfide do today.

Large S isotope fractionation does not require disproportionation
Min Sub Sim, a MIT graduate student supervised by Tanja Bosak and Shuhei Ono, has demonstrated that a pure culture of sulfate reducing bacteria fractionates sulfur isotope as much as 66 per mil, in contrary to previous works that suggest upper limit of 47 per mil. This finding, published in Science in July, questions the major line of evidence for the late Proterozoic oxygenation since oxidative sulfur cycle is not required to explain increased magnitude sulfur isotope fractionation during that time. We suggest that the increased sulfur isotope fractionation in the rock records may reflect changing nature of organics and not directly linked to the oxygen evolution.