Randy Holmes-Farley
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Hold on one moment.....this is certainly true if we talk about life, death and decomposition, but in our systems the bacteria is "eating" whatever carbon we are providing and then utilizing that carbon to grow, build cell walls, proteins, enzymes and everything biological. Ideally when this bacteria is in its prime of life, it gets ripped out of the water column by our skimmers, never having a chance to die and decompose, with one of the final byproducts being carbon dioxide. Now I will concede that there is "respiratory" carbon dioxide released during the bacteria growing, but have to believe that this is minimal.
Sorry, I did not mean to say that no carbon was incorporated into tissue biomass. When I said all organic carbon dosing I meant all types, not every molecule dosed. That wasn't well said.
It certainly is incorporated into tissue to some extent.. But the CO2 produced is not likely to be minimal. I do not have data handy for ethanol or acetic acid or biopellets, but these two papers show that carbon incorporation into rapidly growing bacteria using glucose is about half, the other approximate half (a bit less than half in one paper, and a bit more than half in another) being CO2:
http://www.microbiologyresearch.org...est&checksum=953C93C7D70E6B358CD87B1002EB7E04
see Figure 3 for biomass vs CO2 incorporation of the C
And in this paper its 40-60% incorporation into biomass:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15668759
Carbon mass balance methodology to characterize the growth of pigmented marine bacteria under conditions of light cycling.
Abstract
A carbon mass balance methodology employing minimal measurements was applied to heterotrophic and photoheterotrophic marine bacteria grown under constant dilution and exposed to 12-h intervals of light or darkness. Carbon mass balance calculations using measurements taken every 3 h closed to within 93-103% using dissolved organic carbon, biomass carbon and CO2 production data only, indicating that background interference from dissolved inorganic carbon variations in the amended seawater medium was not significant. Neither strain was observed to sustain a net CO2 fixation using paramagnetic measurement of oxygen uptake rates (OUR), indicating a need for more sensitive on-line measurement techniques for OUR. Photoheterotrophic growth demonstrated lower carbon-mole biomass yields (0.41+/-0.026 vs. 0.64+/-0.013 mol mol(-1)) despite higher specific glucose uptake rates (0.025 vs. 0.02 mol mol(-1) h(-1)), suggesting that bioreactor-based study of marine bacteria can present growth modes that are different from those encountered in the marine environment.
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