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Posted on 26 Sep. 2018
Scientists believe that a quarter of the planet's microbes could come from the thirty or so phyla – a classification between kingdoms and classes – of microbes that have never been grown in the lab and could dominate almost every environments except for the human body. "All vertebrates, each animal with a spine, are contained in a single phylum. This means that we have potentially 30 different types of microbes that are each as different from all known microbes as sea star giraffes. "
"Uncultured microbes are so different that cultured microbes that they can do unusual things, like surviving extremely low energy or growing extremely slowly, in a way hard to imagine for us. It is also possible that these microbes do not grow alone in the crop because they die if they are removed from their complex relationships with each other or with their particular environment. Given that these microbes provide many ecosystem services, such as helping to grow crops and fight climate change, solving the big puzzle they presented to us is a crucial challenge for modern microbiology ", said Lloyd.
The research was led by Karen Lloyd, associate professor at the University of Tennessee, Department of Microbiology, Knoxville. Lloyd's study is the first estimate of the population of uncultivated microbes.
Scientists have long been aware of this mass of uncultivated microbes, also known by scientists as microbial dark matter. However, counting them one by one would be an impossible task, and so far researchers have not even been able to estimate their numbers.
To estimate how many uncultivated microbes call this planet home, Lloyd and his team collected all the DNA sequences deposited in public databases by researchers around the world, totaling 1.5 million and compared them 26,000 sequences of microbes and bacteria.
"We quickly reached a serious computational limit, but we were fortunate to collaborate with the Joint Institute of Computer Science at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory," said Lloyd. "They were able to provide the computing power we needed to get the job done."
The study and characterization of uncultivated microbes can be a particularly useful tool in specific areas, such as in medicine, where scientists have described cases of crop-resistant pathogens.
Does the Earth reflect the cosmos? The image at the top of the page shows a vast canvas of dark matter, simulated in the form of black filaments in the dark universe that provides the large-scale structure of the universe. The gas accumulates at the intersections of the filaments to form the luminous galaxies observed in the night sky. (American Museum of Natural History)
The Daily Galaxy via the University of Tennessee
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