Microbial metabolism of Tholin

Abstract

Tholin, a class of complex organic heteropolymers hypothesized to possess wide solar system distribution, is shown to furnish the carbon and energy requirements of a wide variety of common soil bacteria which encompasses aerobic, anaerobic, and facultatively anaerobic bacteria. Some of these bacteria are able to derive not merely their carbon but also their nitrogen requirements from tholin. The palatability of tholins to modern microbes is speculated to have implications for the early evolution of microbial life on earth; tholins may have formed the base of the food chain for an early heterotrophic biosphere, prior to the evolution of autotrophy on the early earth.