Motility drives bacterial encounter with particles responsible for carbon export throughout the ocean

[摘要] Numerical abundance is often considered of primary importance when identifying microbial taxa that drive biogeochemical processes. However, there are a growing number of examples where numerically less abundant microbes carry out critical ecosystem processes. Here, we discuss a paradigmatic example and the mechanism that underpins it: how motility, by dramatically increasing encounter rate, allows otherwise rare microbes to be numerically dominant on particles that are responsible for vertical carbon export throughout the ocean.

[学科分类] 口腔科学