The thermodynamic landscape of methanogenic PAH degradation
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Methanogenic degradation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) has long been considered impossible, but evidence in contaminated near surface environments and biodegrading petroleum reservoirs suggests that this is not necessarily the case. To evaluate the thermodynamic constraints on methanogenic PAH degradation we have estimated the Gibbs free energy values for naphthalene, phenanthrene, anthracene, pyrene and chrysene in the aqueous phase, and used these values to evaluate several possible routes whereby PAHs may be converted to methane. Under standard conditions (25 °C, solutes at 1 M concentrations, and gases at 1 atm), methanogenic degradation of these PAHs yields between 209 and 331 kJ mol(-1). Per mole of methane produced this is 27-35 kJ mol(-1), indicating that PAH-based methanogenesis is exergonic. We evaluated the energetics of three potential PAH degradation routes: oxidation to H(2)/CO(2), complete conversion to acetate, or incomplete oxidation to H(2) plus acetate. Depending on the in situ conditions the energetically most favourable pathway for the PAH-degrading organisms is oxidation to H(2)/CO(2) or conversion into acetate. These are not necessarily the pathways that prevail in the environment. This may be because the kinetic theory of optimal length of metabolic pathways suggests that PAH degraders may have evolved towards incomplete oxidation to acetate plus H(2) as the optimal pathway.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it