Sulfur and oxygen isotope studies of sulfate reduction

I will discuss insights into sulfur and oxygen isotope fractionations of dissimilatory sulfate reduction and specifically insight provided by experiments with natural populations of sulfate-reducing bacteria from Faellestrand, Denmark. The experiments yielded relatively large magnitude sulfur isotope fractionations for dissimilatory sulfate reduction (up to approximately 45 ‰ for 34S/32S), with higher δ18O accompanying higher δ34S, similar to that observed in previous studies. The seawater used in the experiments was spiked by addition of 17O-labelled water and the 17O content of residual sulfate was found to depend on the fraction of sulfate reduced in the experiments. The 17O data provides evidence for recycling of sulfur from metabolic intermediates and for an 18O/16O fractionation of ~25-30 ‰ for dissimilatory sulfate reduction, a magnitude that is consistent with isotopic exchange between a sulfite species and cell water. The molar ratio of oxygen exchange to sulfate reduction was found to be about 2.5. Using recent models of sulfur isotope fractionations we find that our combined sulfur and oxygen isotopic data places constraints on the proportion of sulfate recycled to the medium (78-96 %), the proportion of sulfur intermediate sulfite that was recycled by way of APS to sulfate and released back to the external sulfate pool (~70%) and also that a fraction of the sulfur intermediates between sulfite and sulfide were recycled to sulfate. These parameters can be constrained because of the independent information provided by δ18O, δ34S, 17O labels, and Δ33S.