ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Microbial feedbacks optimize ocean iron availability.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 57 citations in OpenAlex.
- Predicting the range expansion of larger benthic foraminifera under earth's changing climate.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Integrating microbial siderophores into concepts of plant iron nutrition.Nature plants · 2026Review
- Article
- The chitin raft hypothesis for the colonization of the open ocean by cyanobacteria.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Metabolic Potential and Microbial Diversity of Late Archean to Early Proterozoic Ocean Analog Hot Springs of Japan.Microbes and environments · 2025Article
- Ocean iron cycle feedbacks decouple atmospheric CONature communications · 2024Article
- Electrochemical ocean iron fertilization and alkalinity enhancement approach toward COnpj ocean sustainability · 2024Article
- Article
- Jellyfish detritus supports niche partitioning and metabolic interactions among pelagic marine bacteria.Microbiome · 2023Article
- Aerosol Iron from Metal Production as a Secondary Source of Bioaccessible Iron.Environmental science & technology · 2023Article
- Siderophores as an iron source for picocyanobacteria in deep chlorophyll maximum layers of the oligotrophic ocean.The ISME journal · 2022Article
- Petrobactin, a siderophore produced by Alteromonas, mediates community iron acquisition in the global ocean.The ISME journal · 2022Article
- Hierarchical routing in carbon metabolism favors iron-scavenging strategy in iron-deficient soilProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Iron is the limiting factor for biological production over a large fraction of the surface ocean because free iron is rapidly scavenged or precipitated under aerobic conditions. Standing stocks of dissolved iron are maintained by association with organic molecules (ligands) produced by biological processes. We hypothesize a positive feedback between iron cycling, microbial activity, and ligand abundance: External iron input fuels microbial production, creating organic ligands that support more iron in seawater, leading to further macronutrient consumption until other microbial requirements such as macronutrients or light become limiting, and additional iron no longer increases productivity. This feedback emerges in numerical simulations of the coupled marine cycles of macronutrients and iron that resolve the dynamic microbial production and loss of iron-chelating ligands. The model solutions resemble modern nutrient distributions only over a finite range of prescribed ligand source/sink ratios where the model ocean is driven to global-scale colimitation by micronutrients and macronutrients and global production is maximized. We hypothesize that a global-scale selection for microbial ligand cycling may have occurred to maintain "just enough" iron in the ocean.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.