Healthy land

Land has a wide variety of uses: agricultural, residential, industrial, and recreational. Microbes play a key role in the terrestrial ecosystem, providing symbiotic relationships with plants. Human use of land has led to the exhaustion of nutrients in soils, contamination of land, and a reduction in biodiversity. Applying our knowledge of microbes will be essential in restoring the biodiversity of affected ecosystems. Greater research into how microbes impact human life on land could all have a positive impact, by increasing crop production, repurposing areas of land and improving microbial biodiversity in soil, land, and water.

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Evolutionary study reveals the toxic reach of disease-causing bacteria across the plant kingdom

The capacity of bacteria to spread disease across the plant kingdom may be much more widespread than previously suspected, according to a comparative evolutionary analysis, using the diversity of Pseudomonas syringae bacteria.

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More Healthy Land

Team of geomicrobiologists walking to a sampling site at the end of an inactive tunnel in a South African gold mine Credit Emil Ruff

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Living in the deep, dark, slow lane: first global appraisal of microbiomes in earth’s subsurface environments

A new study reveals astonishingly high microbial diversity in some of the Earth’s deepest, darkest subsurface environments, including gold mines, in aquifers and deep boreholes in the seafloor.