Biomass production and assimilation of dissolved organic matter by SAR11 bacteria in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean

The SAR11 clade is one of the most abundant bacterial phylogenetic groups in the ocean. Existing data suggests that SAR11 bacteria do not utilize various components of the dissolved organic matter (DOM) pool equally and might be more important to the flux of low-molecular-weight monomers than to that of high-molecular-weight polymers.