Sustained increases in soil temperature cause microbes to dial down protein synthesis over the course of years but potentially on the scale of weeks. At the same time, warming microbial populations increase their carbon dioxide production and growth rate, a study published in Science Advances on March 25 shows, suggesting that bacteria can adapt to changing environments, maintaining a high rate of cell division in the face of warmer conditions.
The study finds that “warming of any duration appears to lead to reduced need to invest in protein machinery, since the kinetic energy of warming accelerates enzymatic and metabolic rates in a compensatory way,” Kristen DeAngelis, a microbiologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who was not involved in this study, writes in an email to The Scientist. “This is a really exciting observation, and presumably one that should be generalizable across systems, not just to soils.”
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