On Friday afternoon May 26, NESSC researcher dr. Darci Rush (NIOZ) will present on her research as speaker of the Friday Earth Sciences Talks (FEST) at Utrecht University. Darci will talk about her work how bacterial biomarkers can help in understanding past climate change events.

Exploiting bacterial lipids: Using bacteriohopanepolyols to trace past climate
Bacteriohopanepolyol lipids (BHPs) have a large structural diversity and are synthesized by a wide range of bacteria. Certain BHPs are unique to bacterial communities (e.g. amino-BHPs are biomarkers for methanotrophic bacteria) and biogeochemical processes (e.g. bacteriohopanetetrol isomer is a biomarker for anaerobic ammonium oxidation).

The high preservation potential of BHPs can be exploited to reconstruct paleoclimate in sediment records. Recent results have shown that specific BHPs found in soil can be used to calculate the critical environmental variables of mean annual air temperature (MAT) and soil pH. In fact, our initial study found that the BHP indices defined for MAT and pH correlate better with their variables than more widely used organic proxies (i.e. branched GDGTs).

This talk will present work on the development of these promising new BHP-based proxies and introduce an upcoming PhD position that will be funded at NIOZ.

Date: 26 May 2023
Time: 16:00 – 17:00
Location: Koningsbergerbuilding, COSMOS room
Online via: https://tinyurl.com/fest-teams