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Our planet has nearly 10 million animal species. But what about life forms that are invisible to us? How many species of bacteria, archaeas, protists or other fungi inhabit the Earth? The answer: a lot. More than stars in our entire galaxy.
Our galaxy is home to about 200 billion people, but that number, no matter how big, is nothing compared to the 1,000 billion species of microorganisms on Earth. This is at least what suggests estimates made in 2016 by biologists from the University of Indiana (USA). If this is the case, we would know only one-thousandth of 1% of all species on the planet, despite all our efforts to document the catalog of life. While the understanding of microbial biodiversity has evolved over the last decade (thanks to high-throughput sequencing and bioinformatics), there is still much to be done.
"Estimating the number of species on Earth is one of the biggest challenges in biology," said Jay T. Lennon of Indiana University there is few months and lead author of the study. The researchers claim to have identified up to 5.6 million species on 35,000 different sites around the world. Models of prediction of the development of biodiversity then allowed to estimate the number of species to more than one trillion. We are not talking here about the number of microorganisms, but the number of species. The total number of living organisms on Earth – a non-million (10 to the power of 30) would far exceed the total number of stars in the Universe.
Knowing the number of microbial species on Earth – in addition to satisfying our intrinsic curiosity – could indeed have beneficial consequences for our species. The prospect of biodiversity still to be exploited could indeed stimulate the development of alternative fuels or drug treatments. Such discoveries can allow the development of new crops to feed our rapidly growing population, for example, despite the land's poverty.
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