Interactive comment on “Autotrophic fixation of geogenic CO2 by microorganisms contributes to soil organic matter formation and alters isotope signatures in a wetland mofette” by M. E. Nowak et al

a misleading term and do not represent the organisms that we wanted to target with qPCR analyses. Our target was to get information about the potential of CO2 fixation through the Calvin Benson Basham Cycle (CBB) in the mofette soils. This is important for our mass balance approach, because the metabolic cycle determines the δ13C value of the microbial end-member in the isotope mass balance. This data should be complementary to information about acetogenic and methanogenic pathways from previous studies (Beulig et al. 2014, see manuscript for reference) (see also discussion, 4.3). The term chemoautotrophic microorganisms should reefer to organisms using the CBB cycle for CO2 fixation and I agree that also other microbes than chemolithoautotrophic organisms use CBB Cycle. In turn not all chemolithoautotrophes use the CBB Cycle, although it is the most common metabolic cycle. Therefore the term is not correct in this context and I changed it to “autotrophic microorganism using the CBB cycle”. The data for the qPCR was taken from the same soil than for the labelling experiments (mofette soil 1), although they were sampled at different time points.