Microbial activities and phosphorus cycling: An application of oxygen isotope ratios in phosphate

Microorganisms carry out biochemical transformations of nutrients that make up their cells. Therefore, understanding how these nutrients are transformed or cycled in natural environments requires knowledge of microbial activity. Commonly used indicators for microbial activity typically include determining microbial respiration by O2/CO2 measurements, cell counts, and measurement of enzyme activities. However, coupled studies on nutrient cycling and microbial activity are not given enough emphasis. Here we apply phosphate oxygen isotope ratios (δ18OP) as a tool for measurement of microbial activity and compare the rate of isotope exchange with methods of measuring microbial activities that are more commonly applied in environmental studies including respiration, dehydrogenase activity, alkaline phosphatase activity, and cell counts. Our results show that different bacteria may have different strategies for P uptake, storage and release, their respiration and consequently expression of DHA and APase activities, but in general the trend of their enzyme activities are comparable. Phosphate δ18OP values correlated well with these other parameters used to measure microbial activity with the strongest linear relationships between δ18OP and CO2 evolution (r = −0.99). Even though the rate of isotope exchange for each microorganism used in this study is different, the rate per unit CO2 respiration showed one general trend, where δ18OP values move towards equilibrium while CO2 is generated. While this suggests that P cycling among microorganisms used in this study can be generalized, further research is needed to determine whether the microorganism-specific isotope exchange trend may occur in natural environments. In summary, phosphate oxygen isotope measurements may offer an alternative for use as a tracer to measure microbial activity in soils, sediments, and many other natural environments.