Microbial influences on paleoenvironmental changes during the Permian-Triassic boundary crisis

The biosphere interacts and co-evolves with natural environments.Much is known about the biosphere’s response to ancient environmental perturbations,but less about the biosphere’s influences on environmental change through earth history.Here,we discuss the roles of microbes in environmental changes during the critical Permian-Triassic(P-Tr)transition and present a perspective on future geomicrobiological investigations.Lipid biomarkers,stable isotopic compositions of carbon,nitrogen and sulfur,and mineralogical investigations have shown that a series of microbial functional groups might have flourished during the P-Tr transition,including those capable of sulfate reduction,anaerobic H2S oxidation,methanogenesis,aerobic CH4oxidation,denitrification,and nitrogen fixation.These microbes may have served to both enhance and degrade the habitability of the Earth-surface environment during this crisis.The integrated microbial roles have enabled the Earth’s exosphere to be a self-regulating system.

Microbial roles equivalent to geological agents of high temperature and pressure in deep Earth

Microbes not only show sensitive responses to environmental changes but also play important roles in geochemical and geophysical systems. It is well known that microbes have caused major changes in surface environments and biogeochemical cycles through Earth history. Microbial processes can also induce the synthesis of certain minerals under Earth-surface conditions that previously were believed to form only under high temperatures and pressures in the deep Earth. For example, microbes can promote the conversion of smectite to illite, synthesis of authigenic plagioclase, precipitation of dolomite, and biotransformation of geolipids. These effects of microbes are due to their large surface/volume ratios, enzyme production, and abundant functional groups. Microbial catalyzation of chemical reactions proceeds through reaction-specific enzymes, a decrease in Gibbs' s free energy, and/or break through the dynamics reaction thresholds via their metabolisms and physiology. Microbes can lower the surface free energy of mineral nuclei via biophysical adsorption due to their large surface/volume ratios and abundant functional groups. The mineral precipitation and transformation processes induced by microbes are functionally equivalent to geological processes operating at high temperatures and pressures in the deep Earth, suggesting that microbial processes can serve as analogs to deep abiotic processes that are difficult to observe.

Progress and perspective on frontiers of geobiology

Geobiology is a new discipline on the crossing interface between earth science and life science, and aims to understand the in- teraction and co-evolution between organisms and environments. On the basis of the latest international achievements, the new data presented in the Beijing geobiology forum sponsored by Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2013, and the papers in this special issue, here we present an overview of the progress and perspectives on three important frontiers, including geobiology of the critical periods in Earth history, geomicrobes and their responses and feedbacks to global environmental changes, and geobiology in extreme environments. Knowledge is greatly improved about the close relationship of some significant biotic events such as origin, radiation, extinction, and recovery of organisms with the deep Earth processes and the resultant envi- ronmental processes among oceans, land, and atmosphere in the critical periods, although the specific dynamics of the co-evolution between ancient life and paleoenvironments is still largely unknown. A variety of geomicrobial functional groups were found to respond sensitively to paleoenvironmental changes, which enable the establishment of proxies for paleoenvi- ronmental reconstruction, and to play active roles on the Earth environmental changes via elemental biogeochemical cycles and mineral bio-transforrnations, but to be deciphered are the mechanisms of these functional groups that change paleoenvi- ronmental conditions. Microbes of potential geobiology significance were found and isolated from some extreme environments with their biological properties partly understood, but little is known about their geobiological functions to change Earth envi- ronments. The biotic processes to alter or modify the environments are thus proposed to be the very issue geobiology aims to decipher in the future. Geobiology will greatly extend the temporal and spatial scope of biotic research on Earth and beyond. It has great potential of application in the domains of resource exploration and global change. To achieve these aims needs coor- dinative multidisciplinary studies concerning geomicrobiology and related themes, database and modeling of biogeochemical cycles, typical geological environments, and coupling of biological, physical, and chemical processes.