Looking across the endless flickering grass of the Kansas plains, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a simple ecosystem. But underneath that grass, a symphony of life hums.
A teaspoonful of Kansas soil contains tens of thousands of microbial species,says phys.org.And now scientists have managed to untangle the complex strains of life that make up the Kansas prairie symphony.
No sample of soil has ever received a closer and more thorough treatment than the Kansas soil that was recently catalogued by researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. This was the first reconstruction of the complete genome of a single microbe ever from a complex soil sample. The genetic makeup of 129 species of different soil microbes. It's a big stride toward sorting out which species are present in a complex soil sample.
How those species interact remains a huge question. And these researchers have only scratched the surface. There are an estimated 100,000 species in a random sample of Kansas soil.