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The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) may be capable of finding biogenicgases in the atmospheres of habitable exoplanets around low mass stars.Considerable attention has been given to the detectability of biogenic oxygen,which could be found using an ozone proxy, but ozone detection with JWST willbe extremely challenging, even for the most favorable targets. Here, weinvestigate the detectability of biosignatures in anoxic atmospheres analogousto those that likely existed on the early Earth. Arguably, such anoxicbiosignatures could be more prevalent than oxygen biosignatures if life existselsewhere. Specifically, we simulate JWST retrievals of TRAPPIST-1e todetermine whether the methane plus carbon dioxide disequilibrium biosignaturepair is detectable in transit transmission. We find that ~10 transits using theNear InfraRed Spectrograph (NIRSpec) prism instrument may be sufficient todetect carbon dioxide and constrain methane abundances sufficiently well torule out known, non-biological CH$_{4}$ production scenarios to ~90%confidence. Furthermore, it might be possible to put an upper limit on carbonmonoxide abundances that would help rule out non-biological methane-productionscenarios, assuming the surface biosphere would efficiently drawdownatmospheric CO. Our results are relatively insensitive to high altitude cloudsand instrument noise floor assumptions, although stellar heterogeneity andvariability may present challenges.

Detectability of biosignatures in anoxic atmospheres with the James Webb Space Telescope: A TRAPPIST-1e case study