Publications by authors named "Tristan A Caro"
Article Synopsis
- Measuring the growth rate of microorganisms is crucial for understanding their role in ecosystems, as it reflects their resource use, biomass production, and impact on elements essential for life.
- Microbial adaptability determines their success, where rapid reproduction in favorable conditions and survival strategies in harsher conditions are linked to their relative growth rates.
- Advanced techniques like omics and stable isotope probing allow scientists to analyze microbial growth in soil, helping to connect microbial diversity and environmental factors to important ecosystem processes like carbon flux and nutrient cycling.
Article Synopsis
- Microbial growth rates are crucial for studying environmental geochemistry and ecology, but measuring activity at the single-cell level poses significant challenges in complex environments.
- Stable isotope probing (SIP) is explored as a method to track microbial growth using isotopic labels, and this study specifically evaluates the use of Raman microspectroscopy for measuring deuterium (2H) in microbial biomass.
- Findings suggest that Raman spectroscopy provides a more reliable measurement of microbial growth rates compared to nanoSIMS, paving the way for its application in analyzing microbial populations in complex samples effectively.
Hydrogen stable isotope probing of lipids demonstrates slow rates of microbial growth in soil.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
April 2023
The rate at which microorganisms grow and reproduce is fundamental to our understanding of microbial physiology and ecology. While soil microbiologists routinely quantify soil microbial biomass levels and the growth rates of individual taxa in culture, there is a limited understanding of how quickly microbes actually grow in soil. For this work, we posed the simple question: what are the growth rates of soil microorganisms? In this study, we measure these rates in three distinct soil environments using hydrogen-stable isotope probing of lipids with H-enriched water.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF