Extracellular enzymatic activity of bacteria in aquatic ecosystems

Abstract

Microbial communities contribute to the dynamics of food webs and biogeochemical processes, making them crucial elements of aquatic ecosystems. Understanding how metabolism and interactions of single organisms create microbial community dynamics and ecosystem scale in extracellular enzymatic activity of bacteria is a general challenge given the enormous diversity of aquatic microbes. In terrestrial, freshwater, and marine environments, extracellular enzymes generated by heterotrophic microbial communities are important regulators of carbon and nutrient cycling. Most microorganisms, such as bacteria and fungi, are responsible for the breakdown of organic compounds in water habitats. Aquatic hyphomycetes, which are fungi, predominate in microbial communities that break down organic molecules. Extracellular enzymes produced by these fungi help in the nutrient and carbon sequestration process as well as the breakdown of sophisticated plant polymers. Studies of extracellular enzymes connected to terrestrial, freshwater, and marine microbial communities are rarely compared across habitats, despite the fact that the carbon and nutrient cycles are interrelated on a global scale. This discrepancy partially results from the fact that environmental factors like temperature, pH, and moisture content, which regulate enzyme activities in terrestrial and freshwater systems, have little ability to explain patterns of enzyme activity in marine settings. Alternatively, variables like the functional diversity of microbial communities may be used to explain the various patterns of enzyme activity so far discovered in the ocean. In any event, numerous research from various systems concentrate on comparable difficulties that draw attention to the similarities in how microbial communities are organized. Examples include the duration of an enzyme’s useful life after release into the environment, the degree to which microbial communities coordinate the expression of an enzyme to break down complex organic substrates, and the impact of the appearance of microbial communities on the activities and kinetics of an enzyme. In order to better assess the effects on the environment and animal health, including human health, more understanding of the microbial community composition of microbial coordinate enzyme and their ecological functions is therefore necessary. This is especially true given that it is predicted that the global abundance of microbial enzyme will increase dramatically.

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