After Imre Freidmann's seminal text on Antarctic Microbiology, published in 1993, there was long period with few comprehensive reviews of cold-adapted microorganisms. The drought was broken in the late 2000s with a series of books focussing on different aspects of this field. This slim treatise is the latest in that series. Written primarily by Japanese expert authors, it is an interesting, informative, but slightly odd collection of chapters.
The content of the text follows a reasonably logical sequence (biodiversity and habitats; physiology and adaptations; biomolecules), but each section is far from comprehensive. The biodiversity chapters (permafrost, artificial habitats, marine habitats and cryophilic fungi) are up-to-date and well written. However, the absence of a review of cold terrestrial habitats (polar and montane), which represents a small but significant proportion of terrestrial Earth, is a significant gap. One, albeit rather small, element of this ‘gap’ is covered in the chapter on cryophilic fungi, but this chapter focuses rather narrowly on snow fungi and contains a substantial section on the physiological adaptations of these organisms.
The four chapters on the physiology and adaptive mechanisms of cold-adapted microorganisms are rather broader in scope. The chapter by Pierre Amato on energy metabolism is particularly detailed and informative, with considerable (and excellent) emphasis on the roles of key pathways and enzymes in cold-adaptation. The following two chapters (cold adaptation proteins and heat shock responses) provide very focussed reviews of critical physiological components of cold-adaptation, and precede a broad-ranging review of protein structure and function in psychrophiles, written by the acknowledged master of this field, Charles Gerday.
The final three chapters are an odd-ball selection of bits and pieces. The chapter on H2O2-resistant organisms focusses, in great detail, on three psychrotolerant organisms (a Vibrio, a Psychrobacter and an Exiguibacterium) and the structure and function of their catalases. While this will be excellent reading for the specialist researcher in either H2O2 resistance or catalase enzymology, it is hard to see how it will be of great interest to the wider readership.
The review of microorganisms in a permafrost ice-wedge could equally well have been positioned in section 1, although the section on the structure and function of the bacterial Resuscitating Promoting Factor (Rpf) is an interesting divergence into a little known area of physiological adaptation.
The final chapter on lipids in cold-adapted microorganisms covers the true breadth of the field, and reviews the entirety of this subject, including literature as far back as the early 1970s. For researchers in the field of bacterial lipidology, this chapter provides a very comprehensive summary of the distribution of the different lipid classes in cold-adapted bacteria.
In summary, while this text will not satisfy all researchers in the field of cold-adapted microbiology, it has some excellent, interesting and extremely well referenced chapters which will certainly reward closer attention.
