How can microbes in the Amazon help mitigate the global effects of climate change? This is what a recent study published in Microbiology Spectrum hopes to address as a tea of researchers from the United States and Peru investigated how microbes located in the Amazonian rainforest could influence the Earth’s carbon cycle, which plays a crucial role in influencing climate change. This study has the potential to help researchers better understand how natural resources could be used to combat climate change but could also increase climate change, as well.
For the study, the researchers analyzed a family of microbes in the Peruvian Amazon peatlands called Bathyarchaeia, which are mostly found in hot springs and often influence the planet’s biogeochemical cycling. They have become adapted to the low-oxygen and wet environment of the Peruvian Amazon, making them intriguing targets for scientific study regarding their influence on Earth’s environment. The peatlands consist of the planet’s largest carbon storage systems with an estimated 3.1 billion tons of carbon being stored in its vast surroundings. Therefore, the researchers determined that these Bathyarchaeia microbes that are present could help regulate the global climate by decreasing climate change or increasing it.
"The microbial universe of the Amazon peatlands is vast in space and time, has been hidden by their remote locations, and has been severely under-studied in their local and global contributions, but thanks to local partnerships, we can now visit and study these key ecosystems,” said Dr. Hinsby Cadillo-Quiroz, who is a professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University and a co-author on the study. “Our work is finding incredible organisms adapted to this environment, and several of them provide unique and important services — from carbon stabilization or recycling to carbon monoxide detoxification and others.”
Image of Dr. Cadillo-Quiroz collecting samples in the Pastaza-Marañón Foreland Basin as part of the study. (Credit: Dr. Hinsby Cadillo-Quiroz)
Going forward, the team aspires to enhance restoration and management for tropical peatlands, given their potential crucial in regulating the planet’s carbon cycle, and possibly climate change.
What new discoveries will researchers make about Amazonian microbes and climate change in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!
As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!
Sources: Microbiology Spectrum, EurekAlert!, ASU News, Tropical Peatlands
