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Eucrite meteorite primary resource

Natural basaltic achondritic meteorite material considered as an experimental feed, distinct from an L-chondrite, terrestrial basalt, a pure mineral or secondary resource. The curated example is the EU specimen in Tonietti et al. (2026). Its reported mineral assemblage is dominated by plagioclase and pyroxene, with minor olivine and quartz. The paper attributes eucrite material to Vesta but gives no exact meteorite name or accession for EU; Table 1 says Skylab (US), whereas the acknowledgments thank SkyFall Meteorites. The experimental specimen's provenance is therefore incompletely resolved. No resource-level criticality designation is inferred from its constituent trace metals.

Microbial & Biochemical Mechanisms (1)

Sphingomonas-associated trace-metal mobilization from eucrite

bioleaching Microbial

Associated Organisms: Sphingomonas desiccabilis (NCBITaxon:429134)

Living Sphingomonas desiccabilis CP1D was incubated with the EU meteorite specimen in glucose-supplemented M9 medium. Element concentrations in clarified liquid differed from a single uninoculated control, with element-dependent enhancement and inhibition. This supports a narrow culture-associated mobilization observation. The experiment does not establish a particular molecular dissolution pathway, isolated-product recovery or a statistically replicated abiotic comparison.

Experimental Context & Analytical Limits:
Methods sections 2.1-2.4 describe crushed fragments no larger than 1 mm, 0.15 g in each 25 mL glass tube, dry-heat sterilized at 250 degrees C for four hours. Each tube received 15 mL M9 with 2% m/V glucose, corresponding to 1% w/v pulp loading. The inoculated starting OD600 was 0.039 +/- 0.006; cultures were incubated statically for 30 days at 25 degrees C. There were three biological replicates and one uninoculated control for each rock type, plus rock-free cultures. Section 2.8 measured a day-30 liquid aliquot centrifuged at 5000 rpm for five minutes; supernatant was acidified to 4% v/v nitric acid for ICP-MS/OES. The pellet was not assayed because biomass could not be separated reliably from rock. A biomass fraction cited from earlier studies was not measured in this experiment. Section 2.9 reports fractions of the bulk elemental inventory and biotic/abiotic ratios; its arbitrary ratio-at-least-two threshold is not a significance test. This was a terrestrial laboratory experiment on a meteorite, with no microgravity treatment or industrial deployment.
Curated Evidence Points:
Methods and EU-specific Results section 3.4/Figure 4B support the experimental culture, substrate and element-dependent liquid-phase observations. The text reports EU platinum extraction as (8.98 +/- 3.20) x 10^-2% of the bulk-rock platinum inventory, and a platinum biotic/abiotic ratio of 2.47 +/- 0.48, with figure error bars defined as standard errors. These source-reported summaries were not recomputed from the unavailable supplementary cells. They are endpoint fractions and ratios, not rates or percentages of isolated platinum recovered.
Figure 4B and section 3.4 show selective responses, not universal enhancement: the EU palladium biotic/abiotic ratio is below two, even though palladium is detected in the cultured liquid. One abiotic replicate cannot characterize control variability; the study's twofold criterion does not supply that missing replication. Large cerium and thorium extraction percentages reported for Sudbury mine specimens elsewhere in the article do not describe EU.
Context_only Source: tonietti2026
Discussion proposes biofilm-associated local complexation and ligand-mediated release, but does not directly measure the causal ligands or demonstrate specific mineral-phase dissolution for EU. Table 2 labels its mineral proportions percent m/V despite the Rietveld method; no corrected unit or independent specimen identity is inferred here. Missing supplementary acquisition and unresolved specimen provenance constrain reuse of the results.

Sources & References

  1. tonietti2026: Tonietti et al. (2026). Bioleaching of critical trace metals by Sphingomonas desiccabilis: substrate-driven selectivity in Earth and space analogues. Frontiers in Microbiology 17:1741305. DOI 10.3389/fmicb.2026.1741305. Complete 14-page publisher PDF and full HTML inspected, including Methods sections 2.1-2.10, Tables 1-2, Figure 4B and EU-specific Results section 3.4. The linked supplements were not acquired through the tested public routes in this curation.
    https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/microbiology/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2026.1741305/full (accessed 2026-10-16)
  2. ncbi_desiccabilis: NCBI Taxonomy 429134, Sphingomonas desiccabilis, species. CP1D is the study's strain designation; this CURIE identifies the species only.
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/Browser/wwwtax.cgi?id=429134 (accessed 2026-10-16)

Curation History

Timestamp Curator Action Summary
2026-10-16T05:14:59.550324Z codex (GPT-6; codex) CREATE Added a natural eucrite feed record with terrestrial Sphingomonas-associated trace-metal mobilization evidence.

Record source: data/records/eucrite-meteorite.yaml