Unveiling the cycle of dimethylsulfoniopropionate in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre

A longstanding scientific enigma exists in oligotrophic subtropical waters: it appears that bacterial respiration contributes up to 90% of total community respiration even though the contribution of bacterial biomass to total biomass is much less. It has been suggested that experimental artifacts including pre-incubation filtration procedures, applied in order to separate bacteria from the rest of the microbial community by means of sizefractionation, and long incubation times used in traditional respiration measurements may lead to erroneous rates, but few field data exist to test this hypothesis.