About the Project

Despite containing the vast majority of carbon on the planet, the Earth’s subsurface represents a mostly uncharacterized frontier for biogeochemistry and microbial ecology. While carbon fixation at the Earth’s surface has been drawing a lot of attention for decades, subsurface carbon fixation remains poorly understood.

Subcarb aims to address this gap through a multidisciplinary approach:

• WP1: Systematic sampling of subsurface environments to investigate carbon fixation strategies via metagenomic and metaproteomic analyses.
• WP2: Microbial culture experiments to explore metabolic versatility under varying environmental conditions.
• WP3: Metabolic modeling integrating our experimental data to predict carbon fixation fluxes.

Objectives

1. Characterize the diversity of carbon fixation pathways in Earth’s subsurface.
2. Understand environmental dependencies and constraints on them.
3. Build predictive models for carbon fluxes across the subsurface.

Subcarb will increase our understanding of the role of subsurface microbial metabolisms in global carbon cycling.