Basic Aerobic & Anaerobic Respiration in Bacteria

[mesocosm]

Greetings All !

"Aerobic respiration" and "anaerobic respiration" are terms that get tossed about quite a bit in reefkeeping cyber-space, but they're very rarely used "cleanly" ... IMO.

Here's a spiffy little tutorial ... with animation, no less ... that explains the electron transport system, aerobic and anaerobic electron receptors, and ATP synthase and the proton gradient. It's by Thomas M. Terry, University of Connecticut.

Aerobic and Anaerobic Respiration
by Thomas M. Terry

Note: You have to "Go" into it for a few clicks to get to the overview. After the overview you'll get to a "Navigation" page which lets you choose the animations.




FYI

[mesocosm]

Greetings All !


See ... this is how the madness perpetuates itself ...


I was skimming through some of my "old" reference sets, and out popped this ...

Combined Nitrification-Denitrification Processes.
Kuenen, J.G. & Robertson, L.A.

Nitrification and denitrification have traditionally been regarded as essentially separate phenomena, carried out by different bacteria in segregated areas of soil, sediments, water or reactors. However, research in the 1980s and 1990s has established that nitrifiers and denitrifiers are not as metabolically fastidious as previously thought, and strict segregation is not necessary. Moreover, some bacteria are able to convert NH4+ and other reduced nitrogen compounds to nitrogen gas and the gaseous nitrogen oxides in combined nitrification/denitrification processes. Such organisms are of interest for wastewater treatment for two opposing reasons. Firstly, the idea of single-stage nitrogen removal has obvious attractions for system design. Secondly, N2O is a serious pollutant, implicated in virtually all current environmental problems (e.g. acid rain, greenhouse effect, ozone depletion)

Extracted from:
FEMS microbiology reviews 15(2-3), 109-117. (1994)

Abstract
(The abstract presents a link to download the full article.)

Very good "general" information, but "muddled" with a lot of stuff that reefkeepers won't find very useful ... EXCEPT ... check out page 5 (in the Acrobat Reader interface ... p. 113 of the article extract itself), and check out the pie graphs.

Actual C:N ratios and the impact of those ratios on the shifts in relationships between autotrophic nitrification vs. heterotrophic nitrification vs. assimilation. It turns out that we may be doing a lot more interesting things than we realized when we dose a carbon source to alter the C:N ratio.


FYI ... JMO