Surely the contribution is cataloging and detailing information about tree microbiomes and not proving that they aren't all identical?
> Despite significant advances in microbiome research across various environments, the microbiome of Earth’s largest biomass reservoir—the wood of living trees—remains largely unexplored. Here, we illuminate the microbiome inhabiting and adapted to wood and further specialized to individual host tree species, revealing that wood is a harbour of biodiversity and potential key players in tree health and forest ecosystem functions. We demonstrate that a single tree hosts approximately one trillion bacteria in its woody tissues, with microbial communities distinctly partitioned between heartwood and sapwood, each maintaining unique microbiomes with minimal similarity to other plant tissues or ecosystem components. The heartwood microbiome emerges as a particularly unique ecological niche, distinguished by specialized archaea and anaerobic bacteria driving consequential biogeochemical processes. Our findings support the concept of plants as ‘holobionts’—integrated ecological units of host and associated microorganisms—with implications for tree health, disease and functionality. By characterizing the composition, structure and functions of tree internal microbiomes, our work opens up pathways for understanding tree physiology and forest ecology and establishes a new frontier in environmental microbiology.
This surely seems like a game changer and won’t need much of deforestation at some point.
Please please please stop believing the lie-box; especially don't post its slop for other people to read. It takes orders of magnitude longer for me to debunk this rubbish than it took you to post it, and that's a problem.
tada
Soil bacteria around plant roots are very different from all other soil.
But in very large scale (e.g., km), geology is main factor of microbiom composition.
So the previous studies usually focus on topics like:
1. how plant <-> enviroment <-> microbiome interactions work in small range(meter/cm/even mm length).
2. how bacteria diversity change in large scale, and how it influce plant and enviroment.
The first type is more common (cheaper), but comparing of bacteria diversity is difficult, usually we nee more than ten plants in each experimental group. So focusing on single plant require very different methods, and it is more difficult check whether it is not caused by random effects.
Considering the two facts above and how often multicellular organisms and unicellular organisms interact, it's highly improbable that any multicellular organism would have evolved without developing a life sustaining dependence on a huge array of unicellular organisms. I would be very surprised if that happened.
I'm not dismissing your remark. Any day where you don't learn at least one new thing is a day wasted. But given the mathematical odds, what you said seems inevitable to me rather than a surprise.
Simple Multicellularity is estimated to have evolved at least 20 and probably more than 50 times for independent events of simple multicellularity.
Complex multicellurarity at least six times (animals, plants, fungi, brown and red algae).
Wouldn’t surprise if for us to know about 50 at this point there were orders of magnitude more that we’ll never know of.
> Wouldn’t surprise if for us to know about 50 at this point there were orders of magnitude more that we’ll never know of.
Indeed! The Wikipedia article mentions it. To be honest, it's a surprise that we know about 50 cases, given the fact that almost none of them had any hard tissue or structures (like bones or shells) that can survive as fossils. Given those odds, we are likely underestimating the cases by several orders of magnitude.
If that's the case, then the relevant Wikipedia article [1] will need a major correction. They reference multiple sources which are more likely to interest you.
Multiple independent emergence of multicellular life didn't really surprise me, considering how often unicellular life mutates. I'm actually surprised by the suggestion that the opposite is the current scientific consensus. Do you have any sources for that? (Not a challenge. Just want to understand the situation and misconceptions if any.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicellular_organism#Occurre...
All multicellular life is eukaryotic, but not all eukaryotes are multicellular, e.g. amoebae.
There are a lot of other kinds of multicellular living beings, which have achieved multicellularity independently, plants and fungi being the most obvious on dry land, but most of these other multicellular life forms had to lose mobility when becoming multicellular.
Only a few have retained some limited mobility when multicellular, e.g. the slime molds, but they are much simpler than those which have lost completely mobility, by having rigid cellular walls, like plants, fungi and several distinct kinds of marine algae.
There are even several kinds of (very simple) multicellular bacteria, among Cyanobacteria (blue-green algae), Myxobacteria (resembling slime molds) and Actinobacteria a.k.a. Actinomycetes (resembling fungi).
A parallel could be drawn with CVCs acquiring startups. Or tiger penis soup. Neither being generally palatable dinner table conversation, but both similarly unlikely consumptive cultural concepts!
This is relevant to the discussion as it poses the idea that greater variability in the biomes of indivual trees could be partly liked to greater genetic variability of the trees themselves. If so, the value of intact large forests is then increased, and may point to non linear decreases in other forsest species.
Was boring for me, compared to the original. Just more of the not so same, with maybe better FX, sometimes.
edit: To expand on that, from memory, the original had for me fucked up cyperpunkish earth, somewhat realistic spaceships/travel, heayv mining industry, cynical execs and military, nerdy techs and scientists.
Compared to most of what else streams over the screens nowadays, it was almost HARD-SF. I like that.
The Way of Water had much less of that, instead more tribalism, maybe some wokery. I don't give a shit about that.
(While I'm at it, the pre-prequel to the Alien-franchise "Alien Earth" with six episodes out ATM has much of that cyberpunkish flair, and is at least slightly more than just 'so-so'.)
After seeing the resolution per eye that is really tempting. Guess I'm having to wait for some other device reaching that, without having to buy into that ecosystem. Something which I can just plug into some of my Linux boxen, without any further hassle ;->
I know insects also have their own microbiomes
bookofjoe•5mo ago
underd0g•5mo ago