In the words of English poet John Donne, "no man is an island."
In the words of Carnegie Science researcher Devaki Bhaya, no microbe is an island, either.
The microbes Bhaya studies, in particular, are extremophiles — organisms that thrive in the intensely hot springs of Yellowstone National Park. For a long time, these microbes were studied in isolation: removed from their natural environment, examined under a microscope, grown in petri dishes to see what they ate and produced. And while that approach is traditional, it's missing something.
"It's great to study things in isolation because you can do a lot of manipulation, but you absolutely miss what they're doing with their friends and foes and cousins," Bhaya says. "How do they behave in a village?"
Devaki wants to study the microbial "village" in the hot springs... to discover how microbes behave within their communities, as well as what genes and functions they might exchange.
"When they work together they make much more complex patterns... the sexy term is emergent behaviors," Bhaya says.
Those emergent behaviors are shifting how researchers think about microbial life, past evolution, and even their own scientific collaboration.
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Today's episode was produced by Hannah Chinn. It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Jimmy Keeley was the audio engineer.
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