Argonne National Laboratory, Environmental Sciences Division, Lemont, IL 60439, USA.
The Ohio State University, Biophysics Program, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.
Trends Microbiol. 2024 Feb;32(2):142-150. doi: 10.1016/j.tim.2023.08.006. Epub 2023 Sep 7.
Life can be stressful. One way to deal with stress is to simply wait it out. Microbes do this by entering a state of reduced activity and increased resistance commonly called 'dormancy'. But what is dormancy? Different scientific disciplines emphasize distinct traits and phenotypic ranges in defining dormancy for their microbial species and system-specific questions of interest. Here, we propose a unified definition of microbial dormancy, using a broad framework to place earlier discipline-specific definitions in a new context. We then discuss how this new definition and framework may improve our ability to investigate dormancy using multi-omics tools. Finally, we leverage our framework to discuss the diversity of genomic mechanisms for dormancy in an extreme environment that challenges easy definitions - the permafrost.
生活可能充满压力。应对压力的一种方法是顺其自然。微生物通过进入一种活动减少、抵抗力增强的状态来实现这一点，这种状态通常被称为“休眠”。但是，什么是休眠呢？不同的科学学科在为其微生物物种和特定于系统的感兴趣问题定义休眠时，强调不同的特征和表型范围。在这里，我们使用一个广泛的框架来提出一个统一的微生物休眠定义，将早期的特定于学科的定义置于一个新的背景下。然后，我们讨论了这个新定义和框架如何提高我们使用多组学工具研究休眠的能力。最后，我们利用这个框架来讨论在一个极端环境中休眠的基因组机制的多样性，这个环境对简单的定义提出了挑战——永冻层。
