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Science

Nearly Three-Quarters of All Known Bacterial Species Have Never Been Studied (nature.com) 23

Posted by msmash from the terra-incognita dept.
Nearly three-quarters of all known bacterial species have never been studied in scientific literature, while just 10 species account for half of all published research, according to a new analysis published on bioRxiv.

The study of over 43,000 bacterial species found that E. coli dominates with 21% of all publications, followed by human pathogens like Staphylococcus aureus. Microbes crucial for human health and Earth's ecosystems remain largely unexplored, University of Michigan biologist Paul Jensen reported.

A new $1-million project by non-profit Align to Innovate aims to help close this gap by studying 1,000 microbes under varying conditions.

Nearly Three-Quarters of All Known Bacterial Species Have Never Been Studied More | Reply

Nearly Three-Quarters of All Known Bacterial Species Have Never Been Studied

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  • Nearly three-quarters of all known bacterial species have never been studied in scientific literature

    How are they known if they have _never_ been studied? This sounds like more than a bit of an exaggeration since presumably they must have been studied wnough to determine that they are a new species.

    It's also a daft metric. We want researchers to spend their time studiying interesting and relevant bacteria like those that cause disease not to start picking species at random. While it is certainly possible that some unexpected discoveries may result from that the problem is that you have to spend a huge

    • Re:How are they Known? (Score:4, Informative)

      by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @02:51PM (#65088593) Homepage Journal

      Old Rummy said it best:
      “As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

    • Re:How are they Known? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Gilgaron ( 575091 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @03:03PM (#65088629)
      I didn't read the article but you can sequence bacteria via PCR that you cannot culture (e.g. archaea species), so while you may discover dozens of species this way you can't learn much about them other than that they exist in specific environments.
      • More or less. The paper looked at bacteria which are present in the Genome Taxonomy DataBase, which uses a range of marker genes/proteins in a genome to identify the species the genome is from and to build a tree of life based on that data. This includes a lot of shotgun sequencing data which produces DNA data from across the genome, compared to a PCR-based technique which normally focuses on a specific part of a genome. The environmental samples (soil, water etc.) this is done on will contain many diffe

      • I didn't read the article but you can sequence bacteria via PCR that you cannot culture (e.g. archaea species), so while you may discover dozens of species this way you can't learn much about them

        Well in my book sequencing the DNA counts as studying them so they have been studied.

    • Nearly three-quarters of all known bacterial species have never been studied in scientific literature

      How are they known if they have _never_ been studied?

      You can know something exists without having studied it.

      • You can know something exists without having studied it.

        In completely general terms that's a possibility. However, in this situation you need to know that a particular bacterium is of a species that has not been seen before and I can't think of any way you can possibly know that without some level of study of it.

    • I assume you didn't read the article. Nowhere was it suggested that uninteresting bacteria be studied.

      "many organisms important to human health that Segata and others have found haven’t even been named, let alone studied"

      • Nowhere was it suggested that uninteresting bacteria be studied.

        Not directly no, but by picking a metric of "number of species studied" that the article implies is too low means that researchers should switch from studying the species they currently are to studying a different species that presumably they are much less interested in. So perhaps "uninteresting" is going too far, but definitely less interesting.

        • As the article said, most of the bacteria in the "top 10 with the most published studies" are human pathogens, and therefor interesting.

          "microbes abundant in healthy human microbiomes don’t crack the list of the 50 best studied" which is understandable.

  • Leaving disappointed, but clean.

  • Also, studies show that only 10% of microfleems are subradiant.

  • Does "species" even apply to bacteria? They are asexual so that the reproductive test used for animals wouldn't apply. Seems a fuzzy guess.

  • There are a gigantic number of species of single-celled organisms and a limited number of researchers, so of course most of the species have never been studied. Yes, a great deal of work has been done on a few species such as E. coli. It is often more useful to understand one species in great detail than to have looked at many superficially. Bacteria particularly change so rapidly that is unlikely we will ever study most of them in enough depth to obtain any real understanding of their place in the ecosy

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