Little Friends
We've heard of underground parties, but this is ridiculous. A new study by an international team of researchers has uncovered troves of microbes thriving in the hostile subsurface of the earth, far from the life-giving energy of the sun.
The findings, published in the journal ScienceAdvances, are the culmination of eight years of first-of-its-kind research comparing over 1,400 datasets from microbiomes across the world.
Chief among the findings is that the dank cracks of the planet's crust could be home to over half of microbial cells on Earth, challenging our previous — and logical — understanding that life gets less diverse and abundant the farther it gets from the sun.
"It’s commonly assumed that the deeper you go below the Earth’s surface, the less energy is available, and the lower is the number of cells that can survive," said lead author Emil Ruff, a microbial ecologist at the famed Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, in a news release about the research. "Whereas the more energy present, the more diversity can be generated and maintained — as in tropical forests or coral reefs, where there’s lots of sun and warmth."
"But we show that in some subsurface environments," he added, "the diversity can easily rival, if not exceed, diversity at the surface."
Breakthrough
That comparable diversity is the key to the group's breakthrough — the researchers wrote in their paper that "species richness and evenness in many subsurface environments rival those in surface environments," in what the team is calling a previously unknown "universal ecological principle."
The study is notable not only for its findings, but also for its methodology.
Prior to the team's work, which began in 2016, there was little concerted effort to standardize microbial datasets from around the globe, due to differences in collection and analysis standards. That changed thanks to a survey led by Bay Paul Center molecular biologist Mitchell Sogin — also a coauthor of the new paper — who organized a drive to standardize microbial DNA datasets from researchers around the world.
The team's comparative work is built on these standardized datasets, allowing them to compare a sample sourced by a team at the University of Utah to that of a sample from the Universidad de Valladolid in Spain.
It's a captivating tale of international collaboration and deep-diving research — paving the way for a fascinating and previously overlooked avenue of research.
More on microorganisms: Researchers Say "Conan the Bacterium" Could Be Hidden Beneath Mars’ Surface
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