Phosphate-limited ocean regions select for bacterial populations enriched in the carbon-phosphorus lyase pathway for phosphonate degradation.

In tropical and subtropical oceanic surface waters phosphate scarcity can limit microbial productivity. However, these environments also have bioavailable forms of phosphorus incorporated into dissolved organic matter (DOM) that microbes with the necessary transport and hydrolysis metabolic pathways can access to supplement their phosphorus requirements. In this study we evaluated how the environment shapes the abundance and taxonomic distribution of the bacterial carbon-phosphorus (C-P) lyase pathway, an enzyme complex evolved to extract phosphate from phosphonates.

Observation of Tunneling-Assisted Highly Forbidden Single-Photon Transitions in a Ni_{4} Single-Molecule Magnet.

Forbidden transitions between energy levels typically involve violation of selection rules imposed by symmetry and/or conservation laws. A nanomagnet tunneling between up and down states violates angular momentum conservation because of broken rotational symmetry. Here we report observations of highly forbidden transitions between spin states in a Ni_{4} single-molecule magnet in which a single photon can induce the spin to change by several times ℏ, nearly reversing the direction of the spin.