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David Karl provides a critical review of the exciting new discipline of microbial oceanography by discussing selected key advances. These include probing the metabolic balance in the oceans, the exciting discovery of bacterial proteorhodopsin, establishing a long-term ocean observatory, the unexpected role of marine Archaea, and attempts to understand the result of perturbing nutrient levels in the sea.
The deep-sea environment comprises a wealth of distinct ecosystems, such as hydrothermal vents, cold seeps and subsurface habitats. A multitude of bacteria and archaea live in these distant niches, and face challenges for growth at extremes of temperature, pressure and carbon limitation. This Review describes life in the deep-sea biosphere and discusses how microorganisms overcome the scarcity of energy resources, which is relevant to understanding the limitations to, and the diversity of, life on Earth.
In this Review, the authors discuss the benefits of thinking about the ocean in terms of microniches and advocate the study of global processes on a microscale. Farooq Azam and Francesca Malfatti stress the need to study oceanic microbiologyin situand to use this as a unifying basis for modelling the influence of microorganisms on the structure of marine ecosystems. This might lead to new insights into the regulation of primary production and carbon cycling.
In coastal systems mixed metabolic strategies of marine heterotrophic bacteria have implications for how efficiently organic carbon is retained in the marine food web, and how climatically important gases are exchanged between the ocean and the atmosphere. These resourceful heterotrophs use light, either directly or indirectly, to obtain supplemental energy and decrease their reliance on organic matter. This Review highlights these mechanisms and their importance to coastal carbon cycling by marine bacteria.
If stretched end to end, the estimated 1030viruses in the oceans would span farther than the nearest 60 galaxies. This reservoir of genetic and biological diversity continues to yield exciting discoveries and, in this Review, Curtis A. Suttle highlights the areas that are likely to be of greatest interest in the next few years.
Unlike prokaryotes, which do not leave a fossil trail, the patterns of change over evolutionary time of eukaryotic phytoplankton can be derived from microfossils. Here, Paul Falkowski and Matthew Oliver use the fossil record, resource competition theory and the physical principles of ocean dynamics to propose how climate might have affected phytoplankton populations in the past, and make predictions for the future.
Stephen Giovannoni and Ulrich Stingl discuss recent advances in the cultivation of bacterioplankton, and review the new insights into the ecology and physiology of these microorganisms that have been enabled by metagenomic and population studies of cultivated strains.
In the past decade marine microbiology has emerged as an important and dynamic discipline. To mark the significant progress enjoyed by this exciting field, Nature Reviews Microbiologyhas specially commissioned a collection of articles that highlight the latest advances and how they are leading to a new understanding of biodiversity, ecology and biogeochemistry.
