Abstract
Microbes in Earth’s aqueous environments
Highlights
The study of microorganisms in aqueous environments, aquatic microbiology, is an inter-disciplinary science with multidisciplinary approaches that spans diverse habitat types, spatial and temporal scales, and perspectives that range from biological organization of cells and nucleic acids to the biogeochemical transformations of inorganic and organic materials
Aquatic microbiology ranges from the Earth’s deep subsurface to distant galaxies, as our understanding of life on Earth provides the basis for examining the possibility of life on other planets, and determining how and where to find it
Current techniques can provide information over even global scales using remote sensing by satellites, or between and within cells using electron microscopy, scanning confocal microscopy or atomic force microscopy, for example. Knowledge across this range of scales is necessary to understand the patterns and activities of microbes in aquatic environments and be able to use this knowledge to predict the future response and function of microbes in our changing planet. Integrating across such large scales is challenging, but scaling of complex systems is fundamental to the systems biology perspective (Raes and Bork, 2008) which should help to see the cross-scale patterns of organisms and ecosystems and to a degree simplify our understanding at multiple scales
Summary
The study of microorganisms in aqueous environments, aquatic microbiology, is an inter-disciplinary science with multidisciplinary approaches that spans diverse habitat types, spatial and temporal scales, and perspectives that range from biological organization of cells and nucleic acids to the biogeochemical transformations of inorganic and organic materials. Knowledge across this range of scales is necessary to understand the patterns and activities of microbes in aquatic environments and be able to use this knowledge to predict the future response and function of microbes in our changing planet.
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