The latest international research: seagrass may be equivalent to a giant global organic carbon pool

　　China News Service, Beijing, May 3 (Reporter Sun Zifa) Springer Nature's professional academic journal "Nature-Ecology and Evolution" recently published an ecological research paper on "super-sweet seagrass". The accumulation of sucrose at the bottom of the grassland is about 80 times higher than the previous ocean record.

This study suggests that seagrasses may act as a large global pool of organic carbon, expected due to the suppression of microbial activity that breaks down carbon.

　　Seagrass meadows are important marine habitats because they both provide shelter and food for marine biodiversity, and may store carbon in plant tissue 35 times as much as a terrestrial rainforest in the same area, the paper said. Carbon is secreted in the form of monosaccharides and other compounds, but the role of marine microbes in the consumption and recycling of this carbon source is not well understood.

　　The co-corresponding author of the paper, Maggie Sogin of the University of California, Merced, collaborated with scientific colleagues to study water samples in the bottom sediments of three different oceanic Poseidon grasslands in the Mediterranean, as well as other seagrass grasslands in the Caribbean and Baltic Seas. (aka pore water), they found unexpectedly high concentrations of sucrose near seagrass roots: Globally, the upper 30 cm layers of seagrass sediments store the equivalent of 0.67-1.34 teragrams of sucrose .

　　The researchers also analyzed microbes living in the sediments beneath the seagrass field and found that while 80 percent of the recovered microbial genomes contained genes that break down sucrose, those genes were only expressed in 64 percent of the genome.

They predicted that the hypoxic environment combined with plant phenolics, which significantly inhibited microbial activity, might explain the accumulation of sucrose.

　　The authors concluded that the accumulation of sucrose beneath seagrasses could serve as a valuable storage of organic carbon, and a related pattern may also be found in other marine and aquatic plants.

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