Tree of loves, in the gardens of Quinta das Tears, in Santa Clara, Coimbra
A single living tree can welcome about a bilion of microbes in its wood, with distinct communities in the internal and external layers. This is not a rounding mistake-and forces us to rethink what really mean trees and the function of forests.
A team of investigators collected samples of 150 living trees of 16 species in the northeast of the United States, and found that a single specimen can welcome a community of up to one million microbes.
These microbial communities are organized clearly, dividing between the inner core and the outer borne, with little overlap between the microbes found in the leaves, roots or soil.
The results of the, led by Jonathan Gewirtzmanresearcher at Yale School of the Environment, were presented in an article published last week in the magazine Nature.
Most of the research on trees have focused on what we can seelike leaves, roots and shell, explains the.
However, forests store vast amounts of carbon through living biomass, dead wood, dead blanket and soils, with estimated global reserves in 861 coal gigatoneladaso In all compartments.
What happens inside Madeira It is not irrelevant to the planet. The inner trunk is not uniform. The core is older, drier and typically more isolated, while the eaten is younger tissue that transports water and nutrients up.
The investigators extracted high quality DNA from wood fabrics and perfilled bacteria and archery in both layers to map Who lives where. The team then combined genetic images with measurements that indicated microbial activity in wood.
These choices matter, because a microbiome is more than a list: It is a structured community whose metabolism can alter the chemistry of your home, highlights Earth.com.
According to the results of the study, the wood favored anaerobic life, which does not need oxygena pattern previously seen in studies that described methanogenic communities to prosper under low oxygen conditions.
Already the exterior of the external wood favors microbes that use oxygensuitable for the role of water in water transport and air exposure.
Bacterial communities are not only organized in layers – they are specific to each species. ”One of the things I found most interesting was the way these microbiomas varied through different species“, Says the chemical and environmental engineer Wyatt Arnoldstudy co -author.
“For example, the-artery inherent in a very different community from that of Pinheiros, and these differences were consistent and conserved,” says the researcher.
“There is one Massive reservoir of unexplored biodiversityCountless microbial species living within the world’s trees, which have never been documented, ”says Jonathan Gewirtzman.” We need to catalog and understand these communities before climate change potentially change them. “
