Core vs degraded lipids — distinguishing living vs dead biomass

55:18looking for. >> Make that makes sense. The point being that the by finding these uh what you say uh bipolar lipids. >> Yeah. Polar lipids. >> Polar lipids. um both sections still being >> in close proximity, meaning that they were preserving something inside that was a bi like a living process. >> That means it was as close to living as we can get because they're still in close proximity. As an organism dies, >> those things naturally because they no longer need to maintain the life inside. They will uh part away from each other. >> Yes. Exactly. And so this is like a tangible way for us to be like this is

55:59>> recently living or currently living versus this is for sure dead. >> Exactly. Exactly. Right. So that's one way of doing this. >> The other way to do this is to actually look at the carbon isotopes in your life. >> Right. There's uh there's two stable isotopes. There's carbon 13 and carbon 12. Carbon 12 is way more abundant than carbon 13 but both are sort of mixed in together. Um, there's a baseline like there's a baseline abundance of them, but life is going to have way more carbon 12 than carbon 13 because it's lighter. And so whatever enzyatic action is happening, the enzymes are lazy and

56:39they're going to use the carbon 12 more than the carbon 13 because the carbon 13 is harder to move around, right? Takes more energy. >> It takes more energy, right? And so for whatever little bit of energy you have, you're going to usually just by probability fix the carbon 12 into your organic chemistry more than your carbon tw carbon 13. So by looking at this abundance, we can also tell whether what we're looking at is alive now >> or has died and is just sort of, >> you know, part of the thing. >> Yes. >> Right. And from this they they found that there's there's one thing that was really cool is when they look at the mudline, right? They have this 2 meters, two or three meters of the ocean floor. Yes.

57:19>> At the very top that's close to the ocean floor, >> they don't see a lot of these biomarkers. Okay. >> So, a lot of the stuff is dead, >> but underneath they're seeing living organisms, >> right? So, there's a living tissue that's happening underneath. There's a layer of dead stuff. >> Yeah. And then there's active biology >> underneath it. >> Underneath it. Right. And by doing a bunch of different oxidation measurements and like HLC's and all this other kind of stuff, they came up with a really complicated ecosystem where you could actually like find like what were the things that are making this happen. And they have an hypothesis where the

58:00methane comes from the bottom and the CO2 comes from the top and the water comes from the top. And they have all of these different mechanisms that they've actually traced through. >> Yep. >> To create a a a magnificent ecosystem, >> right? >> This is it's there's a circle of life just for this >> just in there.