The dis­cov­ery of a for­got­ten meta­bolic path­way adds a new di­men­sion to the global car­bon cycle.

Microbiologists at the Max Planck Institute for terrestrial microbiology in Marburg and the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen have discovered a new metabolic process in the ocean. Ranging from molecular structures of individual genes and detection of their global distribution, their results give insight into the pathway process and its degradation products and thus provide valuable information for future calculations of the ocean`s carbon dioxide balance.