ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Mechanism of water extraction from gypsum rock by desert colonizing microorganisms.
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. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 82 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Life on the edge: mineral incrustations colonized by fungal communities in the sulfur fumarole on Sierra Negra volcano (Galápagos Archipelago).Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Persistent microbial communities in hyperarid subsurface habitats of the Atacama Desert: Insights from intracellular DNA analysis.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Present-day thermal and water activity environment of the Mars Sample Return collection.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Microbial colonization of gypsum: from the fossil record to the present day.Frontiers in microbiology · 2024Review
- How to Survive at Point Nemo? Fischer-Tropsch, Artificial Photosynthesis, and Plasma Catalysis for Sustainable Energy at Isolated Habitats.Global challenges (Hoboken, NJ) · 2024Article
- Multifunctionality in Nature: Structure-Function Relationships in Biological Materials.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- 'Follow the Water': Microbial Water Acquisition in Desert Soils.Microorganisms · 2023Review
- Iron acquisition and mineral transformation by cyanobacteria living in extreme environments.Materials today. Bio · 2022Article
- Picogram-Scale Interstellar Probes via Bioinspired Engineering.Astrobiology · 2022Article
- Disentangling water sources in a gypsum plant community. Gypsum crystallization water is a key source of water for shallow-rooted plants.Annals of botany · 2022Article
- The smallest space miners: principles of space biomining.Extremophiles : life under extreme conditions · 2022Review
- Lithifying and Non-Lithifying Microbial Ecosystems in the Wetlands and Salt Flats of the Central Andes.Microbial ecology · 2022Review
- Seeds of imperfection rule the mesocrystalline disorder in natural anhydrite single crystals.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Inverted channel variations identified on a distal portion of a bajada in the central Atacama Desert, Chile.Geomorphology (Amsterdam, Netherlands) · 2021Article
- Dating correlated microlayers in oxalate accretions from rock art shelters: New archives of paleoenvironments and human activity.Science advances · 2021Article
- Microbial Hotspots in Lithic Microhabitats Inferred from DNA Fractionation and Metagenomics in the Atacama Desert.Microorganisms · 2021Article
- Metabolomics of Dry Versus Reanimated Antarctic Lichen-Dominated Endolithic Communities.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Microorganisms, in the most hyperarid deserts around the world, inhabit the inside of rocks as a survival strategy. Water is essential for life, and the ability of a rock substrate to retain water is essential for its habitability. Here we report the mechanism by which gypsum rocks from the Atacama Desert, Chile, provide water for its colonizing microorganisms. We show that the microorganisms can extract water of crystallization (i.e., structurally ordered) from the rock, inducing a phase transformation from gypsum (CaSO
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