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View our Services09th June 2023
Dimitrios Charlaftis at the 36th IAS Meeting of Sedimentology
Badley Ashton's Dimitrios Charlaftis will be at the 36th IAS Meeting of Sedimentology in Dubrovnik next week. He is one of the convenors of the session 'Analogues and Experiments for Understanding Early Diagenesis of Clastic Sediments'. The session runs from 15:00 to 16:30 on Wednesday the 14th of June, so if you're planning on attending make sure you drop in for it. Dimitrios will also be presenting during the session. His paper is entitled 'Interdependence between bacterial EPS and early grain coat development'. You can see the full abstract below. Don't forget to come and say Hi to Dimitrios at some point during the week, he'll be only to happy to chat with you and discuss what Badley Ashton has to offer you.
Interdependence between bacterial EPS and early grain coat development
Dimitrios Charlaftis1, Stuart Jones2, Lars Grimm3, Andreas Kappler3
1Badley Ashton, LN9 6PB Horncastle, United Kingdom, 2 Durham University, Department of Earth Sciences, DH1 3LE Durham, United Kingdom, 3University of Tuebingen, Center for Applied Geosciences, 72076 Tuebingen, Germany
Correspondence: dcharlaftis@badley-ashton.com
Bacteria are the most abundant forms of life we know on our planet, able to survive in a variety of habitats, that play an important role in mineral formation and transformation processes. Here, we present laboratory experiments in which unconsolidated quartz grains were seeded with Geobacter sulfurreducens cells and exposed to a mineral medium solution for 96 hours at temperatures of between 60 and 120°C. Experimental data show the interdependence between extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) and the early formation of grain-coating material. The occurrence of EPS promotes the development of web and bridging structures binding the quartz grains and creating EPS-coated surfaces. With increasing temperature, an amorphous mineral phase grows preferentially on these surfaces suggesting that EPS can act as a template for mineral nucleation. At temperatures >100°C, the order of crystallinity of the amorphous authigenic phase increases, transitioning to poorly-ordered rosette-like textures.
Key words: Experimental diagenesis, Bacterial biofilms, Mineral formation
Presentation time slot: 15.15-15.30
