The Land, Water and Air Around Us Are Chock-Full of DNA Fragments from Fungi that Mycologists Can’t Link to Known Organisms
June 28th, 2024Via: Scientific American:
If you want to discover a hidden world of new life-forms, you don’t have to scour dark caves or slog through remote rainforests. Just look under your feet. When then-graduate student Anna Rosling went to northern Sweden to map the distribution of a particular root-loving fungus, she found something much more intriguing: Many of her root samples contained traces of DNA from unknown species. Weirder still, she never encountered a complete organism. When the field season ended, she had only isolated bits of raw genetic material. The fragments clearly belonged to the fungal kingdom, but they revealed little else. “I got obsessed,” recalls Rosling, now a professor of evolutionary biology at Uppsala University in Sweden.
Since then mycologists have realized that such phantoms are everywhere. Point to a patch of dirt, a body of water, even the air you’re breathing, and odds are that it is teeming with mushrooms, molds and yeasts (or their spores) that no one has ever seen.
I remember reading something similar about bacterias thriving in the dirt that are very hard to study in labs because they dont feed of the stuff we put into our petry dish or something like that. It was also estimated to form a very big part of all bacteria. Very interesting.
Viruses too. They outnumber bacteria by an order of magnitude, trillions of times more than earth’s grains of sand, millions of times more than the number of stars in the universe, and millions of species yet to be discovered.
Some travel vast distances on dust and winds and through the water cycle. Genes everywhere, a planet awash in genetic information; this paper describes the vast number of bacteria and viruses from the oceans and the Sahara that rain down from the sky in Spain’s Sierra Nevada:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5864199/