A New Field Guide for Earth’s Wild Microbes

There are hardly any places on Earth that aren't inhabited by microbes. But in November, researchers from the Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute announced a significant advance: They have assembled the largest catalog of microbes to date, containing over 50,000 genomes from 18,000 different microbial species—12,000 of which have never been documented before. “It’s a fucking incredible amount of data,” says Jonathan Eisen, evolutionary biologist from UC Davis and a founder of one of the first efforts to catalog microbes, the Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea. Among them are thousands of new genes that encode enzymes with potential uses in medicine; hundreds of new species of archaea; single-celled organisms that release carbon into the atmosphere; and a new species of the bacterium Coxiella, a genus that includes the class B bioterrorism agent Coxiella burnetii—a highly contagious bacteria that can jump from farm animals to humans causing a disease called Q Fever. “It's really meant to be this very large community resource for researchers across the world to be able to then use these data to try to answer questions that they're interested in,” says Emiley Eloe-Fadrosh, head of the Metagenome Program at the Joint Genome Institute and senior author on the new study.