Fe(II)-carbonates, such as siderite, form in environments where O 2 is scarce, e.g., during marine sediment diagenesis, corrosion and possibly CO 2 sequestration, but little is known about their formation pathways. We show that early precipitates from carbonate solutions containing 0.1 M Fe(II) with varying pH produced broad peaks in X-ray diffraction and contained dominantly Fe and CO 3 when probed with X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. Reduced pair distribution function (PDF) analysis shows only peaks corresponding to interatomic distances below 15 Å , reflecting a material with no long range structural order. Moreover, PDF peak positions differ from those for known iron carbonates and hydroxides. Mö ssbauer spectra also deviate from those expected for known iron carbonates and suggest a less crystalline structure. These data show that a previously unidentified iron carbonate precursor phase formed. Its coherent scattering domains determined from PDF analysis are slightly larger than for amorphous calcium carbonate, suggesting that the precursor could be nanocrystalline. Replica exchange molecular dynamics simulations of Fe-carbonate polynuclear complexes yield PDF peak positions that agree well with those from experiments, offering the possibility that the material is a condensate of such complexes, assembled in a relatively unorganised fashion. If this is the case, the material could be nearly amorphous, rather than being composed of well defined nanocrystals. PDF measurements of samples ageing in solution coupled with refinement with the software PDFgui show that the material transforms to siderite or siderite/chukanovite mixtures within hours and that the transformation rate depends on pH. The identified Fe-carbonate precursor may potentially form during anaerobic corrosion or bacterial Fe reduction.

Several methods exist to measure and map fluid velocities in microfluidic devices, which are vital to understanding properties on the micro- and nano-scale. Fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) is a method traditionally exploited for its ability to measure molecular diffusion coefficients. However, several reports during the past decade have shown that FCS can also be successfully used to measure precise flow rates in microfluidics with very high spatial resolution, making it a competitive alternative to other common flow-measurement methods. In 2007 we introduced a modified version of conventional FCS that overcomes many of the artifacts troubling the standard technique. Here we show how the advantages of this method, called dual-focus FCS, extend to flow measurements. To do so, we have measured the velocity flow profile along the cross-section of a square-bore microfluidic channel and compared the result to the theoretical prediction.

Bacterial extracellular metal respiration, as carried out by members of the genus Geobacter, is of interest for applications including microbial fuel cells and bioremediation. Geobacter bemidjiensis is the major species whose growth is stimulated during groundwater amendment with acetate. We have carried out label-free proteomics studies of G. bemidjiensis grown with acetate as the electron donor and either fumarate, ferric citrate, or one of two hydrous ferric oxide mineral types as electron acceptor. The major class of proteins whose expression changes across these conditions is c-type cytochromes, many of which are known to be involved in extracellular metal reduction in other, better-characterized Geobacter species. Some proteins with multiple homologues in G. bemidjiensis (OmcS, OmcB) had different expression patterns than observed for their G. sulfurreducens homologues under similar growth conditions. We also compared the proteome from our study to a prior proteomics study of biomass recovered from an aquifer in Colorado, where the microbial community was dominated by strains closely related to G. bemidjiensis. We detected an increased number of proteins with functions related to motility and chemotaxis in the Colorado field samples compared to the laboratory samples, suggesting the importance of motility for in situ extracellular metal respiration.