Correction to: Nature Communications https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-50883-z, published online 02 August 2024

The original version of this Article contained the following errors:

The Acknowledgements section included an incorrect grant number (‘323250002’). The correct number is ‘32325002’.

The Gibbs free-energy calculations presented in Equations (1–4) incorrectly read ‘−105 kJ/mol hexadecane’, ‘189 kJ/mol hexadecane’, ‘−21 kJ/mol acetate’ and ‘−7 kJ/mol hydrogen’. The calculations have now been corrected to ‘−438.5 kJ/mol hexadecane’, ‘486.3 kJ/mol hexadecane’, ‘−42.2 kJ/mol acetate’ and ‘−29.1 kJ/mol hydrogen’. The mistakes arose due to the omission of unit conversion from calories to joules, and the lack of appropriate correction for pH and temperature. For that reason, the ‘Gibbs free energy calculation’ section in the Methods now states ‘Gibbs free energy calculations were made after Dolfing et al.50 under conditions with 60 °C and pH = 7.0. Gibbs free energies of compounds were taken from Helgeson et al.51 and Hanselmann52 with alkanes in the liquid state, acetate in the aqueous phase and methane, hydrogen and carbon dioxide in the gaseous phase at partial pressures of 1 atm’, in place of ‘Gibbs free energy values was calculated using CHNOSZ package for R (v2.0.0, http://www.chnosz.net/) under conditions with 60 °C and pH = 7.0 at one atmospheric pressure’. References 50-52, cited in the correct version, have now been added to the References list.

These errors have now been corrected in both the PDF and HTML versions of the Article.