tiny but mighty

October 24, 2024 3:17 PM

I was hoping that Georgia Ray would turn out to be the John Berger of microscopy with her article in Asterisk Magazine about the historical trajectories of microbiology. Instead, the piece turned out to be a wonderful exploration of "biological dark matter" and the limits of human efforts to understand the tiny other beings that suffuse our planet.

What we know now is that microbes don’t just interact with the environment; it would be more correct to say they are vast parts of the environment — billions in every gram of soil and every liter of seawater, on and inside every living surface that does not fight tooth and nail to keep them out, making our breathable air, growing our food, tidying up our dead, outweighing and vastly, vastly, vastly outnumbering every other living thing on Earth.

posted by criticalyeast (7 comments total)

A modern epidemiological method is to look for virus DNA in sewage. But the concept is old — as far back as 1932, Philadelphia scientists realized that pandemics in cities could be caught early by detecting polio in sewage. This didn’t catch on, because in 1932, before tissue culture, the status quo for detecting polio was injecting the filtered sewage into a monkey, and then seeing if the monkey caught polio.

Sometimes an innovative idea is not immediately scalable.

This article is fantastic!

EDIT: I am NOT advocating injecting monkeys with raw sewage to see if they catch polio.
posted by Literaryhero at 8:03 PM on October 24

Hey that was fun and informative. About 10 years ago, I was tasked to teach human physiology 101, more or less 40 years since I was in college. In the interim a whole new class of sub-cell organelles "Vaults" had been discovered and isolated by Nancy Kedersha and Leonard Rome in 1986. These nucleoprotein complexes are 3x the size of ribosomes but had somehow scooted under the radar for 50 years of cytology.

Ribosomes?? In 1995, some pals scooped a bucket into Galway Bay and ran the contents through a PCR protocol using small subunit ribosomal RNA for primers. They discovered a whole battery of novel bacterial species unknown to science (and probably impossible to grow on a Petri dish as in the Article). To the nearest whole %, we know nothing about any of the species with which we share the planet.
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:13 AM on October 25 [1 favorite]

The link didn't work for me, so I plugged it into an archiver: this might help if you're in the same boat.

Ed Yong's I Contain Multitudes is a great read on this subject. There's also a good chapter on soil and microbiology in George Monbiot's Regenesis, though it has its (in this case sympathetic) critics.
posted by rory at 1:40 AM on October 25 [1 favorite]

This is the sort of thing that makes me wish I'd studied harder in biology! I love it so much! What are we doing with OBELISKS? What are they FOR?
posted by mittens at 5:19 AM on October 25

Seconding the Ed Yong.

And: I was hoping "animalcules" would appear in the article and I was not disappointed.
posted by neuron at 10:22 AM on October 25

You liek obelisks? U wiww wuv VAULTS.
posted by lalochezia at 12:12 PM on October 25 [1 favorite]

I was diagnosed with methane small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) earlier this year. The phrase "bacterial overgrowth" is a misnomer here, because the critters that generate the methane are of the Archaea domain. (Other types of SIBO do stem from actual bacteria.)

These bugs, as their name implies, have been around the planet for a long, long time. One consequence: when I began antimicrobial treatment, I was cautioned by the patient community NOT to follow the low-FODMAP diet that's suggested for SIBO (rather inexplicably, IMO). This is because the Archaea critters can hibernate for months or years in the absence of adequate food. So I happily fed them all kinds of high-FODMAP foods while I was taking the antimicrobials, and, perhaps as a result, the treatment has met with quite a bit of success, thank God.

From the linked article: "We know almost nothing about thousands and thousands of human genes.... There is a great deal of mystery soup."

I'm happy we can't answer all the questions. A large bowl of mystery soup for me, please.
posted by rabia.elizabeth at 11:14 AM on October 26