RUBISCO SFA

At the Ecological Society of America’s annual meeting in Sacramento, California, this month, Jinyun Tang, a project participant at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Earth Sciences Division (ESD), received honorable mention for the Gene E. Likens Junior Scientist Outstanding Publication Award. Jinyun’s award-winning paper was published last year in Biogeosciences and was co-authored by Bill Riley, also at LBNL’s ESD. In the paper, Jinyun and Bill challenge the classic, 100-year-old mathematical representation, the so-called Michaelis-Menten (or MM) kinetics, finding it unsuitable for modeling resource competition in donor-recipient networks. Instead, they propose an “equilibrium chemistry” approach to solve the problem and develop analytic “equilibrium chemistry approximation kinetics” for easy applications. Their work solves a group of similar problems that have spread within various subfields of ecology and biogeochemical modeling.