Synergy between reactive manganese species and enzymes drives litter decomposition hotspots
Nathan A Chin, Luiz A Domeignoz-Horta, Xiao Jun A Liu, Morris E Jones, Ravi Ranjan, Malak Tfaily, Kristen M DeAngelis, Marco Keiluweit · 2026
Read Synergy between reactive manganese species and enzymes drives litter decomposition hotspots by Nathan A Chin, Luiz A Domeignoz-Horta, Xiao Jun A Liu, Morris E Jones, Ravi Ranjan, Malak Tfaily, Kristen M DeAngelis, Marco Keiluweit (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13623943.txt.
Description
Nathan A Chin and colleagues published a 2026 soil study showing that the border between oxygen-rich and oxygen-poor soil is a hotspot for rotting plant litter. Litter breakdown controls how much carbon soil stores, and textbooks credit oxygen-loving enzymes as the main drivers. The team suspected a reactive form of manganese, a common soil metal, does heavy work where the two zones meet.
In controlled soil reactors, the researchers pushed microbes to make reactive manganese right at that border. Gene activity for litter-chewing enzymes rose many-fold at the same spot. Litter broke down about twenty-nine percent faster where metal and enzymes worked together than elsewhere, and the boost was predicted better by the interface activity than by conditions in either pure zone. The authors say decomposition models that ignore these borders will miss a major control on soil carbon as climates shift soil wetness.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Nathan A Chin, Luiz A Domeignoz-Horta, Xiao Jun A Liu, Morris E Jones, Ravi Ranjan, Malak Tfaily, Kristen M DeAngelis, Marco Keiluweit |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 55 KB |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |