The DOI matches its Crossref record; 5 of the 5 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Limits of life in hostile environments: no barriers to biosphere function?
Open accessAbstract
Summary: Environments that are hostile to life are characterized by reduced microbial activity which results in poor soil‐ and plant‐health, low biomass and biodiversity, and feeble ecosystem development. Whereas the functional biosphere may primarily be constrained by water activity (a w ) the mechanism(s) by which this occurs have not been fully elucidated. Remarkably we found that, for diverse species of xerophilic fungi at a w values of ≤ 0.72, water activity per se did not limit cellular function. We provide evidence that chaotropic activity determined their biotic window, and obtained mycelial growth at water activities as low as 0.647 (below that recorded for any microbial species) by addition of compounds that reduced the net chaotropicity. Unexpectedly we found that some fungi grew optimally under chaotropic conditions, providing evidence for a previously uncharacterized class of extremophilic microbes. Further studies to elucidate the way in which solute activities interact to determine the limits of life may lead to enhanced biotechnological processes, and increased productivity of agricultural and natural ecosystems in arid and semiarid regions.
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Van Der Heijden, M. G. A., Bardgett, R. D., & Van Straalen, N. M. (2008) · Ecology Letters · doi:10.1111/j.1461-0248.2007.01139.x · Cited by 5,053
Prokaryotes: The unseen majority
Whitman, W. B., Coleman, D. C., & Wiebe, W. J. (1998) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.95.12.6578 · Cited by 4,871 · cited 1×
“Furthermore, the vast majority of microbes cannot be cultivated in vitro (Whitman et al., 1998; Rutz and Kieft, 2004; Ward and Fraser, 2005) and some of these may remain elusive as long as the physicochemical parameters that determine their biotic windows for growth are poorly understood.”
BackgroundWater as an active constituent in cell biology
Ball, P. (2008) · Chemical Reviews · doi:10.1021/cr068037a · Cited by 2,177
Hydrated silicate minerals on Mars observed by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter CRISM instrument
Mustard, J. F., Murchie, S. L., Pelkey, S. M., Ehlmann, B. L., Milliken, R. E., Grant, J. A., Bibring, J.-P., Poulet, F., Bishop, J., Dobrea, E. N., et al. (2008) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature07097 · Cited by 794
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Self-citationPossible climate‐change effects on mycotoxin contamination of food crops pre‐ and postharvest
Magan, N., Medina, A., & Aldred, D. (2011) · Plant Pathology · doi:10.1111/j.1365-3059.2010.02412.x · Cited by 402
Paulussen, C., Hallsworth, J. E., Álvarez‐Pérez, S., Nierman, W. C., Hamill, P. G., Blain, D., Rediers, H., & Lievens, B. (2017) · Microbial Biotechnology · doi:10.1111/1751-7915.12367 · Cited by 334
Self-citationIs there a common water-activity limit for the three domains of life?
Stevenson, A., Cray, J. A., Williams, J. P., Santos, R., Sahay, R., Neuenkirchen, N., McClure, C. D., Grant, I. R., Houghton, J. D. R., Quinn, J. P., et al. (2015) · The ISME Journal · doi:10.1038/ismej.2014.219 · Cited by 329
Self-citationXerotolerant bacteria: surviving through a dry spell
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Metadata
- Authors
- Williams, J. P., & Hallsworth, J. E.
- Venue
- Environmental Microbiology
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2009-12
- Volume
- 11
- Issue
- 12
- Pages
- 3292-3308
- ISSN
- 1462-2912 (ISSN-L)
- 1462-2920
- OpenAlex
- W2017527595
- Cited by
- 171
- References
- 5
- FWCI
- 4.92
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
