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Fractionation of Carbon and Hydrogen Isotopes in Biosynthetic Processes^*

National Ocean Sciences Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Facility and Department of Geology and Geophysics, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Woods Hole, Massachusetts 02543

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

	INTRODUCTION

 
This review is concerned with the isotopic relationships between organic compounds produced by a single organism, specifically their enrichments or depletions in ¹³C relative to total-biomass carbon. These relationships are biogeochemically significant because

1. An understanding of biosynthetically controlled, between-compound isotopic contrasts is required in order to judge whether plausibly related carbon skeletons found in a natural mixture might come from a single source or instead require multiple sources.
   
2. An understanding of compound-to-biomass differences must underlie the interpretation of isotopic differences between individual compounds and total organic matter in a natural mixture.
   

My approach is pedagogic. The coverage is meant to be thorough, but the emphases and presentation have been chosen for readers approaching this subject as students rather than as research specialists. In common with the geochemists in my classes, many readers of this paper may not be very familiar with biochemistry and microbiology. I have not tried to explain every concept from those subjects and I have not inserted references for points that appear in standard texts in biochemistry or microbiology. Among such books, I particularly recommend the biochemistry text by Garrett and Grisham (1999) and the microbiology text by Madigan et al. (2000). The biochemistry text edited by Zubay (1998) is also particularly elegant and detailed. White (1999) has written a superb but condensed text on the physiology and biochemistry of prokaryotes.

A schematic overview of the relevant processes is shown in Figure 1. Plants and other autotrophs fix CO₂. Animals and other heterotrophs utilize organic compounds. If the assimilated carbon is a small molecule (like CO₂, CH₄, or acetate), significant isotopic fractionation is likely to accompany the fixation or assimilation of C. Such fractionations establish the isotopic relationship between an organism and its carbon source. Those associated with photosynthesis encode information about . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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