Cold environments dominate the Earth’s biosphere and are colonized by abundant and diverse microorganisms that play potentially critical roles in global biogeochemical cycles—so clearly they are important, but do we have a good concept of what they are?

Whether microorganisms are Bacteria, Archaea, Eucarya or viruses, if they grow in naturally cold environments a good assumption is that they are cold adapted and ‘like’ the cold. The term ‘psychrophile’ reflects this—from Greek, psukhros meaning ‘cold’ and philein, ‘to love’. However, when contemplating the typical traits of psychrophiles, clearly temperature is not the only factor that controls their existence. As with all environmental systems, the abundance of individual taxa and the ecology of the system is determined by the lifestyle (for example, trophism) of each taxon, their responses to all biotic and abiotic parameters that define the system (that is, environmental selection) and biogeographic constraints (that is, the effects of physical barriers and distance on dispersal and colonization).

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