Every Tree Its Own Microbiome

Lush life in the Barro Colorado Forest (Photo: Les Cunliffe /Fotolia)

I like this new study in part because I’ve written about the microbiome, but also because the research took place on Barro Colorado Island in Panama, and I think it relates to a story I wrote there about the microbiome of sloths.  This was back in 1982, before the word “microbiome” existed.  (You can read that story in my book, Every Creeping Thing, or I may try to get around to posting some of the details here at a later date.  In brief, it turns out sloths partition the forest canopy based on the microbiome of different trees.)

Anyway, here’s the press release:

Each tree species has its own bacterial identity. That’s the conclusion of University of Oregon researchers and colleagues from other institutions who studied the genetic fingerprints of bacteria on 57 species of trees growing on a Panamanian island.

“This study demonstrates for the first time that host plants from different plant families and with different ecological strategies possess very different microbial communities on their leaves,” said lead author Steven W. Kembel, now a professor of biological sciences at the University of Quebec at Montreal.

For the study — published this week in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — researchers gathered bacterial samples from 57 of the more than 450 tree species growing in a lowland tropical forest on Barro Colorado Island, Panama.

Scientists at the UO’s Genomics Core Facility sequenced the bacterial 16S ribosomal RNA gene isolated from the samples. That gene, which biologists call a barcode gene, allowed researchers to identify and measure the diversity of bacteria based on millions of DNA fragments produced from bacterial communities collected from the surfaces of leaves, said Jessica Green, a professor at both the UO and Santa Fe Institute.

“Some bacteria were very abundant and present on every leaf in the forest, while others were rare and only found on the leaves of a single host species,” Kembel said. “Each tree species of tree possessed a distinctive community of bacteria on its leaves.”

In the world of microbiology, plant leaves are considered to be a habitat known as the phyllosphere. They are host to millions of bacteria, Kembel said. “These bacteria can have important effects — both positive and negative — on the health and functioning of their host plants,” he said. “For example,

Did a Beetle Cause 15,000 Heart Attacks?

Belvedere Drive, Toledo, Ohio, before

That’s what a new study from the U.S. Forest Service suggests.  Here’s the press release:

“Evidence is increasing from multiple scientific fields that exposure to the natural environment can improve human health.  In a new study by the U.S. Forest Service, the presence of trees was associated with human health.

“For Geoffrey Donovan, a research forester at the Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station, and his colleagues, the loss of 100 million trees in the eastern and midwestern United States was an unprecedented opportunity to study the impact of a major change in the natural environment on human health.

And after. (Photos: Dan Herms)

 

 

 

 

In an analysis of 18 years of data from 1,296 counties in 15 states, researchers found that Americans living in areas infested by the emerald ash borer, a beetle that kills ash trees, suffered from an additional 15,000 deaths from cardiovascular disease and 6,000 more deaths from