Dance Your PhD 2015: Temperature Sensitivity of Soil Microbial Enzymes

Soil, although largely hidden from view, teems with life! More microbes live in the soil than the combined total number of plants and animals that live on earth. Microbes in the soil (the black suited swimmers) secrete different types of extracellular enzymes (the blue suited swimmers) that break down a variety of food sources known as substrates (the green suited swimmers), into smaller pieces for microbes and plants to eat. Historically scientists thought that as temperature (shown as the red suited swimm