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The Earth Microbiome Project is an interesting idea.
The basic premise is that we wanted to be able to compare samples from soil,
from plants, from animals, from water and air, from deep sea volcanoes, and
from off the top of mountains.
We wanted to be able to tell you what kinds of bacteria lived in
those environments.
And how they compare between those different environments.
So, you know, were there more of some bacteria living in somebody's guts in
the middle of New York, and
how did they compare to deep sea volcanoes under the sea of the Pacific, you know?
What were the, what the bacteria living,
living in the Arctic like in the snow up there compared to the Sahara desert.
We just didn't know these things.
So the, the studies that had been done previously didn't provide us
with that kind of information.
So in 2010, we, we got together as a group in the mountains above Salt Lake City in
Utah and sat down and said, well, now what could we do to answer that question.
And we decided to think about trying to standardize the way we did our science.
In this sounds like it shouldn't be revolutionary but
it, it actually was a reasonable revolutionary idea.
Do everything in the same way so we can compare between the projects.
Shocking.
It just so happened that you know, there were a couple of people at that meeting
Rob Knight at Colorado, and Janet Jansson at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,
who felt the same way as me.
And decided that, you know, maybe this could be done.
What's great is that we now get samples from all around the world.
Thousands of samples every, every month.
In fact soil samples and leaves and ants and, and fish guts and, and
sediments from the bottom of the Pacific to to soils at the top of Mount Everest.
We've, we pretty much covered it all.
We, we even have swabs from the International Space Station.
So we, we, we're getting a comprehensive perspective of
microbial life on this planet.
What bacteria live where?
And how abundant are they?
And how are bacteria that are found in hot deserts similar to
bacteria that are found in cold deserts?
Antarctica, very few people really appreciate this is a desert.
So, probably one of the driest places on earth.
Very little precipitation there.
Virtually no snow.
You get a lot of blowing snow that comes off of the peaks.
But those are from very infrequent precipitation events.
So, that's a, a very dry place.
Similarly, the Atacama Desert or the you know,
deserts around Death Valley, these are also very dry places.
So these bacteria living in those environments are used to two things.
One, being very dry and living with very little moisture.
And two, being with, in the absence of plants.
Plants in general they, they bind the soil together with their roots.
But they also pump carbon.
They, they take light from the sun and
they make carbon and they synthesize it to sugars.
And they pump those sugars into the soil, okay?
The bacteria love those sugars and
they take advantage of them, it's a food source.
Now, if you remove plants, the bacteria living in the soil struggle.
Then they tend to fight each other quite dramatically.
So they produce lots of antibiotics and antibiotic resistance.
And so in, in a Seminole paper, as part of the, one of the first EMP, big EMP studies
we did, of microbiome studies we did, was to look at soils in hot deserts and
cold deserts with Noel Fieri at Boulder University of Colorado at Boulder.
And we, we saw that the bacteria in the cold deserts and hot deserts
fighting each other tooth and nail producing almost an arms race in the soil.
Because, there was so little, available for them to eat, that they they fought for
every morsel they could get their hands on metaphorically speaking of course.
The, the bacteria I'm most excited to get hold of, the ones I
really want to see are the bacteria that live within the earths crust.
In fact, there are bacteria living down there.
This is, this is un, underneath seven kilometers of ocean.
Underneath you know,
kilometers of rock, there are bacteria living in the interstitial spaces.
The tiny little bits of the space that live between rocks.
And, they live there and they, they have amazing lifestyles.
These, these guys the, you and
I perform millions of energetic reactions every minute as human beings.
These guys perform one energetic reaction every 10,000 years.
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As far as we're concerned they're not really alive but they're still living.
And they, they live for an immense amount of time.
Easily they're probably the longest living organisms anywhere on earth.
And we know virtually nothing about them.
These are the bacteria that could potentially survive on asteroids in space,
and could populate new worlds.
So if you, if you believe in those kinds of theories that
space could be a transit for bacterial life between planets.
These are the kinds of organisms we should be exploring.
Theyre the ones that could potentially terror form new planets.
And so if I could get any samples it'd be those kinds of samples.
You can imagine if if we wanted to, to create life on another planet we would
turn immediately to the organisms on this planet which created life for us.
Without them, we wouldn't be able to exist.
Why is that?
Well, Earth never had an oxygenated atmosphere.
There was no oxygen in the atmosphere of the early Earth.
It was bacteria, particularly thionyl bacteria that learned a neat trick.
Evolved a neat trick.
They took energy from the sun and used it to fix carbon dioxide from this
carbon dioxide rich atmosphere, and their byproduct, their respired gas, was oxygen.
And over millions of years, they breathed enough of this oxygen into the atmosphere
to do two point catastrophic things for most of the organisms on this planet.
They made it an oxygenated atmosphere, which was poisonous to a lot of life.
But they also by creating all this oxygen in
the atmosphere changed the the type of ion that existed on the planet.
Iron started to rust all over the planet.
And we can see that in the geological layer there's a, there's a point where
the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere got so high that all the iron on earth rusted.
And there's a bunch of rust in the in the geographic layer.
It's quite remarkable geological feat.
Rob KnightProfessor
Dr. Jessica L. MetcalfSenior Research Associate
Dr. Katherine R. AmatoPostdoctoral Research Associate
