At the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Janet Jansson stocks her fridge with baggies full of dirt. It comes from places as diverse as Antarctic permafrost and Kansas farmland. Her samples are the starting point for the Earth Microbiome Project, an epic effort to figure out how all the world’s microbes collectively support life.
Every gram of soil contains tens of thousands of species—up to 100 terabytes of genetic data. Those critters sequester carbon, fertilize plants, decompose organic material, and do a lot of other work we barely understand. Problem is, the microbes are so interdependent that isolating the most industrious organisms is tricky. “They live together in communities,” Jansson says. “It's hard to break up those associations.” So instead the scientists are hunting DNA, isolating all the genes in soil and seawater, regardless of which organism they belong to. The plan is to build a global “gene atlas,” then to work out how nutrients and waste products migrate through the ecosystem. Eventually that understanding might allow us to engineer microbes to be ultraefficient producers of biofuel, or even take control of the carbon cycle.
Three places where the Earth Microbiome Project
is mapping how small things shape big ecosystems:
By monitoring the balance of bacteria in the English Channel, project scientists can predict changes in the population of microscopic sea plants known as phytoplankton. Since these organisms occupy the bottom of the food chain, the researchers could forecast what types and quantities of fish to expect in the coming season.
Bacterial populations on native, uncultivated plots in Kansas, Iowa, and Wisconsin are more similar to one another than to those on adjacent native and cultivated plots in those states. This shows that growing crops like corn seriously alters the microbial balance of the prairie. Since microbes are responsible for how carbon and nitrogen move through the ecosystem, a better understanding of them could help tell farmers which bugs might be used to boost crop production.
Scientists at the project are learning how to monitor oil-eating bacteria near the wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon rig. They hope to detect seepage caused by the BP disaster and analyze its long-term environmental impact. The bacteria could provide more accurate data than even the best scientific instruments.
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