What's Up Down There? Microbial Diversity in Caves Microorganisms in caves survive under nutrient-poor conditions and are metabolically versatile and unexpectedly diverse

By Hazel A. Barton, V. Jurado. 2007

133 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In studying metabolic versatility, microbial ecologists often focus on those microbes that grow in extremes of temperature, osmolarity, pressure, and pH; however, these physical settings often contain microbes within high-energy systems such as sulfidic hot springs or photosynthetically driven biofilm communities. The vast majority of microbial species are not situated within such energetically favorable settings. Rather, they eke out existences under extremes of near-starvation or oligotrophy, defined as having less than 2 mg of total organic carbon (TOC) per liter. With diverse oligotrophic communities found in oceans, sediments, and within the subsurface, researchers are attempting to understand how various microbial species manage to live under such nutrient-poor conditions. Amid this heightened interest, access to such oligotrophic environments remains challenging, and doing research at such sites often requires very costly equipment, including oceangoing vessels or subsurface drilling equipment.

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Microbial Diversity in Caves (2016, background): “However, due to the presence of low amounts of nutrients, which are a chemically complex source of carbon and energy, all high-energy reactions necessary for growth are unlikely to be performed by a single microorganism (Barton and Jurado 2007).”