Microbial Communities in Aquifer Ecosystems

Dear Colleagues,

Aquifers are major ecosystems in the terrestrial subsurface, harboring a vast diversity and abundance of microbial communities. These habitats function as open systems, with water flowing from the surface to the subsurface and eventually reaching the surface once more. The water flowing in these environments brings microbes and nutrients to the subsurface, fueling this ecosystem in various ways. Although the advent of high-throughput sequencing has developed the study of diversity, community structure, and function of these communities, it remains unclear what drives community assembly, which organisms constitute these communities (from all three domains of life, i.e., Archaea, Bacteria and Eukaryotes), or the impact of surface communities and environments on subsurface aquifer habitats.

Therefore, this special issue of Microorganisms invites you to send contributions pertaining to any aspect of microbial community studies in aquifer ecosystems, pristine or contaminated, shallow or deep, using molecular biology based genomic, and -omic, studies, as well as culture-based studies in microbiology, environmental microbiology, and microbial ecology. We encourage the submission of papers associating microbial community analyses with environmental parameters (e.g., geochemical, geological), as well as papers focusing on eukaryotic communities in aquifer habitats.

Dr. Cassandre Sara Lazar
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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