After completing one of the most exhaustive microbial studies to date, scientists have revealed that Earth may be home to one trillion microbial species, and only one-thousandth of one per cent of them have so far been identified.
According to a study from biologists at Indiana University, which is based on universal scaling laws applied to large data sets, there’s an estimated 99.999 per cent of species left undiscovered in the world. Soils are a great example, being one of the largest reservoirs of microbial diversity on Earth. The scientists said it's not uncommon for a gram of soil to contain one trillion cells and 10,000 species of bacteria.
But some experts believe that these undiscovered forms of life could hold the answer to many of the world’s environmental problems, such as diseases, climate change and poor harvesting of crops. "With so many microbial species, you have to wonder what novel functional roles do these species play in global ecosystems and how could these roles be harnessed in curing disease, improving crop yields, fighting climate change, or cleaning toxic environments?," Simon Malcomber, director of the National Science Foundation's Dimensions of Biodiversity program who funded the study, told WIRED.
Microbial species refers to all forms of life too small to be seen with the naked eye, including all single-celled organisms, such as bacteria and archaea, as well as certain fungi.
The data comes from a study of 5.6 million microscopic and non-microscopic species from 35,000 locations across all the world's oceans and continents, except Antarctica. They were compiled of 20,376 sampling efforts on bacteria, archaea and microscopic fungi and 14,862 sampling efforts on communities of trees, birds and mammals.
But there’s still a lot of work to be done.
The NSF is hoping that by 2020, it can transform what it knows about the scope of life on Earth by filling major gaps in humanity’s knowledge regarding the planet’s biodiversity. It believes that many earlier attempts to estimate the number of species on Earth simply ignored microorganisms or were informed by older data sets that were based on biased techniques or questionable extrapolations. "The study shows that we are just beginning to quantify the immense microbial diversity the surrounds us," added Malcomber.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
