Collaborative Research: Development of Numerical Models Linking Fluid Geochemistry and Biological Communities in Mid-Ocean Ridge Hydrothermal Environments

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This research is novel in that its creates a first-of-a-kind model that accounts for the effects of fluid transport and microbial metabolic processes in fluid mixing environments at seafloor hydrothermal vent systems. Hydrothermal vents are some of the most interesting and important extreme environments on the planet and the microbes that inhabit them are potential targets for new compounds for natural products studies from which new and important pharmaceuticals might be derived. This project links together for the first time, the chemosynthetic hydrothermal vent biological communities and the geologic/geochemical processes taking place in the subsurface. The resulting mathematical and computational models portray chemical environments that account for the impact of microbial metabolism on evolving fluid chemistry during the mixing of seawater and hydrothermal fluid and could be used to direct bioprospecting. Models will be constrained by reported compositions of high-temperature, focused and low-temperature diffusively venting fluids as well as microbial distribution in seafloor hydrothermal environments collected during the RIDGE 2000 program. The broader impacts of the work include creating modeling codes for reactive transport modeling which explicitly include reactions mitigated by microbes, student training, and the development of a workshop on modeling bioenergetic reactions.