Ph. D. LIN Wei and his team assess the impact of temperature on freshwater magnetotactic cocci through laboratory microcosm simulations. It is so far unclear how temperature influences the abundance and community composition of magnetotactic bacteria (MTB) that mineralize intracellular magnetite and/or greigite magnetosomes and play significant roles in the global iron cycling and sediment magnetization.

Taken together, their results indicate that elevated temperature can influence the abundance and diversity of dominant members of magnetotactic cocci. This linkage further infers that the abundance and diversity of MTB (e.g., based on the fossil magnetosomes) may be useful in reconstruction of paleotemperature.

Figure 1. Phylogenetic tree and heatmap displaying the abundance of OTUs with ≥98% similarity in 12 microcosms after 10 days of incubation. (Image by LIN)

Figure 2. Effect of temperature on the communities of magnetotactic cocci from each 10-day microcosm. (Image by LIN)

Wei Lin, Yinzhao Wang and Yongxin Pan. Short-term effects of temperature on the abundance and diversity of magnetotactic cocci. MicrobiologyOpen. 2012, 1(1): 53-63 (Downloade Here)