Waves submerge the algae, forcing us to hop onto higher ground to avoid getting wet feet.聽For the next few months, the聽rocky beach outcrop I am on in聽the Kamay Botany Bay National Park, Sydney, will be a lab for Kim聽Lema at the University of New聽South Wales, Australia.
She is studying a type of algae聽whose chemicals attract certain microbes, forming a microscopic community on its surface that plays an important role in its health.
To identify these microbes, Lema is getting their DNA sequenced. These sequences will聽then be logged on a public database. There, they will join information on 1.7聽million bacteria, 1.8聽million tiny eukaryotes and nearly 1.2聽million聽fungi from across Australia as part of the first concerted effort to catalogue an entire continent鈥檚 microbiome.
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Around 40聽organisations are聽involved in the Australian Microbiome Initiative, which hopes聽to determine what healthy聽ecosystems look like at聽the聽microscopic level before climate change and habitat destruction alter them irreversibly.
Evolution鈥檚 solutions
It is a very ambitious project, according to Martin Ostrowski at聽the University of Technology, Sydney, who is contributing marine microbial sequences to聽the聽database. 鈥淎ll the data that聽we鈥檙e聽collecting is a really important resource,鈥� he says.
鈥淥ne way of thinking about it聽is聽that it gathers three and a half聽billion years of evolution of聽a聽whole range of different solutions聽to different problems,鈥� says Ostrowski. This could help us聽in various ways, he says, from microbial methods of cleaning up聽pollution to developing new聽antibiotics.
Ostrowski and his colleagues have used drones to sample microbes living in the breath expelled from the blowholes of聽dozens of humpback whales migrating off the coast of Sydney. They used the database to identify precisely which species came from聽the whales鈥� breath and which聽were captured from the environment, he says. In doing so,聽they identified six new virus species to add to the evolutionary tree and established a baseline to inform future studies of whale respiratory health.
Microbial dictionary
Andrew Bissett at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in聽Canberra has been using the database to help farmers navigate Australia鈥檚 strict biosecurity regulations. The island nation has聽notoriously tight import rules,聽designed to protect its native聽species and agriculture from invasive alien organisms.
However, overseas companies are developing bacteria that can be added to soils to boost crop growth. Until now, local farmers have had to find and isolate such organisms from within the country to ensure that they weren鈥檛 importing a potentially damaging version. But now, Bissett says he has helped to identify the overseas organisms in the database, demonstrating to the authorities that they are naturally found within Australian soils and are, therefore, safe to import and use on farms.
So far, the collaboration has sequenced only a small fraction of聽the billions of microbes that live in Australia. But even this is helpful,聽says Anna Fitzgerald at Bioplatforms Australia, the group overseeing the initiative.
The project team hopes to study聽several thousand more sites聽in Australia over the next three years. 鈥淎t this stage, we鈥檙e just trying to understand what鈥檚 out there,鈥� says Lema. 鈥淭o build a聽dictionary of what we have.鈥�
