4 ms·

Serious question: how could it not? Surely the contribution is cataloging and detailing information about tree microbiomes and not proving that they aren't all

Serious question: how could it not? Surely the contribution is cataloging and detailing information about tree microbiomes and not proving that they aren't all identical?

MangoToupe 1y ago
As always, clicking past the newspaper headline and through to the research shows that it is the newsroom that introduces this confusion. Here’s the abstract, showing that the microbiome is indeed assumed and the paper is offering an initial exploration as to what precisely this microbiome consists of: > 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.
- kinj28 1y ago
  Can we get lab made wood then ?
  - kinj28 1y ago
    ChatGPT tells me inventwood and zinnia from MIT are already at some stage in the lifecycle. This surely seems like a game changer and won’t need much of deforestation at some point.
    - wizzwizz4 1y ago
      InventWood's product is treated wood, not synthetic wood. Zinnia is a genus of flowering herbs: ChatGPT was badly-paraphrasing this article: https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/lab-grown-3d-printed-wood https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/lab-grown-3d-p..., which says the company's called Foray, and judging by their website (https://foraybio.com/ https://foraybio.com/), they've pivoted to just culturing plant cells, largely for chemical processing – so presumably, the 3D-printing was non-viable at the materials scale. (Apparently, they still intend to manually-construct seeds, but I can't see evidence they've succeeded at that.) Even more recently, Foray has pivoted to AI… somehow. Don't ask me how that works. 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.
  - andoando 1y ago
    1. Get a lab 2. Fill floor with soil. 3. Plant tree 4. Water tada
melagonster 1y ago
Because on a larger scale, trees of the same species will have very specific microbiomes. In the past, most of the studies focused on ecology scales.
- ants_everywhere 1y ago
  I'm sorry, but I don't quite understand. When you say "very specific microbiomes" do you mean similar microbiomes? I.e. on a larger scale there is much more across-specifies microbiome variability than within-species microbiome variability? Or have I misunderstood?
  - melagonster 1y ago
    Oh, I did not notice your comment, sorry. 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.
schuyler2d 1y ago
The headline is a little crazy. This is like someone talking about the Human Genome Project and the headline reading "scientists discover humans have DNA" The diversity at many levels was even known. They're just trying (which is great) to get far more known genomes (the same way we are doing with human microbiomes now)

Serious question: how could it not? Surely the contribution is cataloging and detailing information about tree microbiomes and not proving that they aren't all identical?

MangoToupe 1y ago

As always, clicking past the newspaper headline and through to the research shows that it is the newsroom that introduces this confusion. Here’s the abstract, showing that the microbiome is indeed assumed and the paper is offering an initial exploration as to what precisely this microbiome consists of: > 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.

kinj28 1y ago
Can we get lab made wood then ?
- kinj28 1y ago
  ChatGPT tells me inventwood and zinnia from MIT are already at some stage in the lifecycle. This surely seems like a game changer and won’t need much of deforestation at some point.
  - wizzwizz4 1y ago
    InventWood's product is treated wood, not synthetic wood. Zinnia is a genus of flowering herbs: ChatGPT was badly-paraphrasing this article: https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/lab-grown-3d-printed-wood https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/lab-grown-3d-p..., which says the company's called Foray, and judging by their website (https://foraybio.com/ https://foraybio.com/), they've pivoted to just culturing plant cells, largely for chemical processing – so presumably, the 3D-printing was non-viable at the materials scale. (Apparently, they still intend to manually-construct seeds, but I can't see evidence they've succeeded at that.) Even more recently, Foray has pivoted to AI… somehow. Don't ask me how that works. 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.
- andoando 1y ago
  1. Get a lab 2. Fill floor with soil. 3. Plant tree 4. Water tada

melagonster 1y ago

Because on a larger scale, trees of the same species will have very specific microbiomes. In the past, most of the studies focused on ecology scales.

ants_everywhere 1y ago
I'm sorry, but I don't quite understand. When you say "very specific microbiomes" do you mean similar microbiomes? I.e. on a larger scale there is much more across-specifies microbiome variability than within-species microbiome variability? Or have I misunderstood?
- melagonster 1y ago
  Oh, I did not notice your comment, sorry. 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.

schuyler2d 1y ago

The headline is a little crazy. This is like someone talking about the Human Genome Project and the headline reading "scientists discover humans have DNA" The diversity at many levels was even known. They're just trying (which is great) to get far more known genomes (the same way we are doing with human microbiomes now)