Jaap Damsté Sinninghe - Biography#

Educated as an environmental analytical chemist, he received his PhD in organic geochemistry (1988 at Technical University of Delft) for studying the origin of organically-bound sulfur in the geosphere. He was able to show by molecular analysis that early diagenetic reactions of inorganic sulfur and organic matter and not the biogenic organic sulfur in biomass was the source for fossil organic sulfur.

In 1993, he started his own research group at the interface of biology, geology and chemistry at the Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, focusing on the following topics:

(1) intact polar and core membrane lipids of archaea, bacteria and algae using novel analytical approaches and their application in microbial ecology,

(2) development of proxies based on organic compounds for paleoclimate studies and

(3) application of organic proxies in palaeoenvironmental and palaeoclimatic reconstruction of the past 200 million years on a variety of time scales.

In the last twp decades, his group has developed several novel analytical methods that led to the recognition of new classes of biomarkers, such as tetraether lipids and ladderane lipids. Important novel lipids were rigorously identified such as crenarchaeol, a highly specific biomarker for Thaumarchaeto. This has resulted in new insights into the distribution of micro-organisms producing these lipids, e.g. Thaumarchaeota that turned out to be important nitrifiers in the ocean, the evolutionary history of groups of diatoms, and the role of anaerobic ammonium oxidizing (anammox) bacteria in the biogeochemical nitrogen cycle. Furthermore, based on the distribution of these compounds, he developed novel tools for paleo-environmental reconstructions, including TEX86 a proxy for sea surface temperature, the BIT index for the input of soil organic carbon in marine sediments and MAT index for mean annual air temperature based on bacterial tetraether lipids in soils. He has provided the scientific community with tools to reconstruct air temperatures from the geological past.