Editorial: Studies on life at the energetic edge – from laboratory experiments to field-based investigations, volume II

Creators: Hoehler, Tori M.¹; Amend, Jan P.²; Jørgensen, Bo Barker³; Orphan, Victoria J.⁴; Lever, Mark A.⁵

1. Ames Research Center
2. University of Southern California
3. Aarhus University
4. California Institute of Technology
5. The University of Texas at Austin

Editor:: Teske, Andrea

Abstract

[Opening paragraph] Among the diverse inhabitants of Earth's biosphere, microorganisms reign supreme in their capabilities to occupy an expansive range of ecological niches. We often conceive of the fringes of our biosphere in terms of physicochemical “extremes”, but perhaps the most pervasive environmental challenge to microbial life is that of extreme energy limitation (Hoehler and Jørgensen, 2013; Lever et al., 2015; Bradley et al., 2020). Globally, for example, the marine deep biosphere occupies a volume and hosts a biomass comparable to that of the overlying oceans, yet that deep biosphere is sustained by an energy flux about 1,000 times lower (Hoehler et al., 2023). Both in the sub-seafloor and in the continental subsurface, these energy-starved organisms exist at the interface between the inhabited and uninhabited realms of our planet. To understand their physiology in the face of extreme energy limitation would, therefore, be to understand the capabilities and limitations of the ultimate arbiters of chemical exchange between the biosphere and the geosphere.

Copyright and License

© 2024 Hoehler, Amend, Jørgensen, Orphan and Lever. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Acknowledgement

This special collection of articles accompanies the 4th International Workshop on Microbial Life under Extreme Energy Limitation (MicroEnergy 2022), which took place in Sandbjerg, Denmark, in September 2022. We gratefully acknowledge Kasper Urup Kjeldsen and Hans Røy for their many contributions to the organization of the workshop and the Aarhus University Research Foundation, the Carlsberg Foundation, the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations (C-DEBI), Frontiers in Microbiology, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for their financial support of the workshop.

Funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. TH was supported by the NASA Planetary Science Division's ISFM program.

Contributions

TH: Writing—original draft. JA: Writing—review & editing. BJ: Writing—review & editing. VO: Writing—review & editing. ML: Writing—original draft, Writing—review & editing.

Edited and reviewed by: Andreas Teske, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, United States

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

The author(s) declared that they were an editorial board member of Frontiers, at the time of submission. This had no impact on the peer review process and the final decision.

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