Articles of Significant Interest Selected from This Issue by the Editors

摘要

Denitrification is a globally significant sink for fixed nitrogen in the oceans, confined primarily to oxygen-deficient sediments and suboxic waters. Wyman and colleagues (p. 26702681) have isolated into culture pelagic denitrifying Alphaproteobacteria that, intriguingly, also express genes of the denitrification pathway in oxic waters. They show that this phenomenon is associated with waters that support the growth of Trichodesmium spp. and go on to reveal that the aerobic denitrifiers are habitual components of the epibiotic taxa of these nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria. The authors propose that the pseudobenthic environment provided by Trichodesmium spp. might provide the hypoxic niches required for pelagic denitrification in well-ventilated waters.There is increasing evidence suggesting that microorganisms may interact in unique ways with surfaces that have nanoscale topography of a characteristic length much smaller than the microbial cells' dimensions. The attachment of food-borne bacteria to surfaces with micro- and nanoscale features was investigated by Hsu et al. (p. 27032712). Their results indicate that attachment occurred such that the cells' contact area with the surface was maximized, although the underlying mechanisms of attachment seem to depend on surface feature size. These discoveries create the opportunity to engineer surfaces with microbial repellant properties, which could help prevent biofilm formation and proliferation of microbial contamination.