Serious question: how could it not?

Surely the contribution is cataloging and detailing information about tree microbiomes and not proving that they aren't all identical?

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MangoToupe 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

As always, clicking past the newspaper headline and through to the research shows that it is the newsroom that introduces this confusion. Here’s the abstract, showing that the microbiome is indeed assumed and the paper is offering an initial exploration as to what precisely this microbiome consists of:

> Despite significant advances in microbiome research across various environments, the microbiome of Earth’s largest biomass reservoir—the wood of living trees—remains largely unexplored. Here, we illuminate the microbiome inhabiting and adapted to wood and further specialized to individual host tree species, revealing that wood is a harbour of biodiversity and potential key players in tree health and forest ecosystem functions. We demonstrate that a single tree hosts approximately one trillion bacteria in its woody tissues, with microbial communities distinctly partitioned between heartwood and sapwood, each maintaining unique microbiomes with minimal similarity to other plant tissues or ecosystem components. The heartwood microbiome emerges as a particularly unique ecological niche, distinguished by specialized archaea and anaerobic bacteria driving consequential biogeochemical processes. Our findings support the concept of plants as ‘holobionts’—integrated ecological units of host and associated microorganisms—with implications for tree health, disease and functionality. By characterizing the composition, structure and functions of tree internal microbiomes, our work opens up pathways for understanding tree physiology and forest ecology and establishes a new frontier in environmental microbiology.

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kinj28 4 days ago | parent [-]

Can we get lab made wood then ?

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andoando 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

1. Get a lab 2. Fill floor with soil. 3. Plant tree 4. Water

tada

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kinj28 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

ChatGPT tells me inventwood and zinnia from MIT are already at some stage in the lifecycle.

This surely seems like a game changer and won’t need much of deforestation at some point.

	▲	wizzwizz4 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		InventWood's product is treated wood, not synthetic wood. Zinnia is a genus of flowering herbs: ChatGPT was badly-paraphrasing this article: https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/lab-grown-3d-p..., which says the company's called Foray, and judging by their website (https://foraybio.com/), they've pivoted to just culturing plant cells, largely for chemical processing – so presumably, the 3D-printing was non-viable at the materials scale. (Apparently, they still intend to manually-construct seeds, but I can't see evidence they've succeeded at that.) Even more recently, Foray has pivoted to AI… somehow. Don't ask me how that works. Please please please stop believing the lie-box; especially don't post its slop for other people to read. It takes orders of magnitude longer for me to debunk this rubbish than it took you to post it, and that's a problem.

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schuyler2d 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The headline is a little crazy. This is like someone talking about the Human Genome Project and the headline reading "scientists discover humans have DNA" The diversity at many levels was even known. They're just trying (which is great) to get far more known genomes (the same way we are doing with human microbiomes now)

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melagonster 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Because on a larger scale, trees of the same species will have very specific microbiomes. In the past, most of the studies focused on ecology scales.

	▲	ants_everywhere 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I'm sorry, but I don't quite understand. When you say "very specific microbiomes" do you mean similar microbiomes? I.e. on a larger scale there is much more across-specifies microbiome variability than within-species microbiome variability? Or have I misunderstood?