Scope

Aquatic Microbiology is devoted to advancing the study of microbes in aqueous environments, with a focus on freshwater, estuarine and oceanic ecosystems. Aquatic microorganisms play diverse roles in ecosystems, and are key to earth’s biogeochemical cycles. Further, aquatic microbes are genetically, physiologically and ecologically diverse and exhibit many different patterns of evolution, adaptation and physiological responses. Frontiers aims to publish high quality research findings relating to the roles that bacteria, archaea, microbial eukarya and their viruses play in aquatic chemistry, food webs, and biogeochemical cycling.

This section welcomes manuscripts on these topics:

• Laboratory experiments with cultures or mixed populations and environmental experiments.
• Studies of physiological, genetic, genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic aspects of aquatic microorganisms in the environment and communities (e.g., metagenomics).
• Novel techniques providing new knowledge on the nature of microbial communities in the environment.
• New method developments, reviews and perspectives.

Acceptance criteria for manuscript considerations:

• All presented studies should provide scientific rationale for consideration in the Aquatic Microbiology
• Research employing environmental ~omics approaches, including the report of nucleic acid (DNA and RNA) sequences: these must be accompanied by contextual environmental data or experiments that address aspects of the biology of the studied microorganisms.
• Submissions based on environmental genomics should generally not be based on limited replication (e.g. single samples, stations or time points), and datasets should be deposited in and accessible from pertinent public repositories at the time of submission.
• Environmental genomics studies should use the most recent analytical pipelines and databases and the report of such data should be accompanied by compositional analyses.
• In most cases, descriptive studies of microbial community structures in highly specialized and/or engineered biomes such as aquaculture or mariculture will not be considered.

Scope considerations for manuscripts:

• Aquatic Microbiology will consider genomic studies at a microbial population level as described above, but work reporting on genome sequence analysis of a single species may benefit from submission to the Evolutionary and Genomic Microbiology
• Studies focused on the interaction between aquatic microorganisms and animals should be submitted to the Microbial Symbioses section, or, in the case of domesticated animals, to the Veterinary Science journal
• For interactions between aquatic microorganisms and humans, please consider the Infectious Diseases section
• Studies focusing on virus host interactions in aquatic environments should consider submitting to the Virology or Phage Biology sections
• Research involving microbially-mediated degradation processes of toxic compounds or wastewater treatment studies may benefit from a submission to the Microbiotechnology section
• Studies on microbial processes in wetlands may benefit from submission to the Terrestrial Microbiology section

Submission

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