Entangled life by Merlin Sheldrake shows how, amongst many other amazing facts, tightly integrated mushrooms and trees are. Everything about this is amazing to me.
The sheer volume of life here is incredible. I already know trees to be stewards of life on earth but wasn't aware they had complex inner ecosystems themselves.
Multicellular life seems to have appeared independently from unicellular life several times in the past, including 6 instances of complex multicellular life from eukaryotic cells, that led to animals and land plants. It may also have happened repeatedly, with some disappearing altogether in course of time. Another important aspect of life is the extreme prevalance of symbiosis, even among unicellular life. It's even theorized that the genesis of the entire Eukaryota domain and many of its organnelles (notably mitochondria and chloroplasts) are the results of repeated cellular endosymbiosis where a unicellular organism consumed a prokaryote that eventually becomes a useful part of the host cell instead of its food.
Considering the two facts above and how often multicellular organisms and unicellular organisms interact, it's highly improbable that any multicellular organism would have evolved without developing a life sustaining dependence on a huge array of unicellular organisms. I would be very surprised if that happened.
I'm not dismissing your remark. Any day where you don't learn at least one new thing is a day wasted. But given the mathematical odds, what you said seems inevitable to me rather than a surprise.
Thanks for the additional detail! It is really fascinating to think about not just the individual traits but the collective traits and behavior of life across Earth that got it where it is today. Indeed, I'm not surprised so much at finding life in all the cracks on earth (there is life even deep in the crust!) but moreso I didn't realize the scope of it (interior biomes, exterior biomes, etc). Really cool stuff. Makes me appreciate the trees even more.
One has to imagine that there were a substantial number of misfires along the way too. Multi-cellular organisms that popped up and died for one reason or another before they had a chance to reach escape velocity. Like an amoeba that eats a bacteria and incorporates it but the mud puddle they are in dried up.
Wouldn’t surprise if for us to know about 50 at this point there were orders of magnitude more that we’ll never know of.
> I was under the impression that the scientific consensus today was that multicellular life only appeared once.
If that's the case, then the relevant Wikipedia article [1] will need a major correction. They reference multiple sources which are more likely to interest you.
Multiple independent emergence of multicellular life didn't really surprise me, considering how often unicellular life mutates. I'm actually surprised by the suggestion that the opposite is the current scientific consensus. Do you have any sources for that? (Not a challenge. Just want to understand the situation and misconceptions if any.)
Perhaps you think about animals, which have appeared only once, i.e. multicellular living beings capable of complex movements.
There are a lot of other kinds of multicellular living beings, which have achieved multicellularity independently, plants and fungi being the most obvious on dry land, but most of these other multicellular life forms had to lose mobility when becoming multicellular.
Only a few have retained some limited mobility when multicellular, e.g. the slime molds, but they are much simpler than those which have lost completely mobility, by having rigid cellular walls, like plants, fungi and several distinct kinds of marine algae.
There are even several kinds of (very simple) multicellular bacteria, among Cyanobacteria (blue-green algae), Myxobacteria (resembling slime molds) and Actinobacteria a.k.a. Actinomycetes (resembling fungi).
You might be thinking of the genesis of eukaryotes, which is thought to be from a specific event where one archaeon incorporated a bacterium, and all eukaryotic organisms are descended from the resulting symbiotic arrangement, with our nuclear DNA descending from the archaeon, and our mitochondria descending from the bacterium.
All multicellular life is eukaryotic, but not all eukaryotes are multicellular, e.g. amoebae.
It's even theorized that the genesis of the entire Eukaryota domain and many of its organnelles (notably mitochondria and chloroplasts) are the results of repeated cellular endosymbiosis where a unicellular organism consumed a prokaryote that eventually becomes a useful part of the host cell instead of its food.
A parallel could be drawn with CVCs acquiring startups. Or tiger penis soup. Neither being generally palatable dinner table conversation, but both similarly unlikely consumptive cultural concepts!
Supposedly they also emit ultrasonic sounds when lacking water, or getting leaves cut (ie reacting to stress), and some animals can hear them, and some trees release pheromones to warn others about predation and downwind plants can pick this up and make themselves more bitter by ramping up tannin production. Plants are more interesting than they seem.
Trees(softwoods) have greater genetic variability between indivuals of the same species than humans, which made prosecuting "log jacking" much easier, as a simple chip could be taken from each log at a mill or on a truck and matched to stumps of trees taken illegaly. The great variability amongst indivuals makes genetic matching, fast and cheap.
This is relevant to the discussion as it poses the idea that greater variability in the biomes of indivual trees could be partly liked to greater genetic variability of the trees themselves.
If so, the value of intact large forests is then
increased, and may point to non linear decreases in other forsest species.
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)
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.
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.
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?
Entangled life by Merlin Sheldrake shows how, amongst many other amazing facts, tightly integrated mushrooms and trees are. Everything about this is amazing to me.
Richard Powers' novel "The Overstory" takes this premise and wraps a wonderfully entertaining and fact-suffused novel around it. Highly recommended.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Overstory
New business idea- probiotics for plants! (Why not, there are already mycorrhizal fertilizers)
it does exist and it's called compost tea
The sheer volume of life here is incredible. I already know trees to be stewards of life on earth but wasn't aware they had complex inner ecosystems themselves.
Multicellular life seems to have appeared independently from unicellular life several times in the past, including 6 instances of complex multicellular life from eukaryotic cells, that led to animals and land plants. It may also have happened repeatedly, with some disappearing altogether in course of time. Another important aspect of life is the extreme prevalance of symbiosis, even among unicellular life. It's even theorized that the genesis of the entire Eukaryota domain and many of its organnelles (notably mitochondria and chloroplasts) are the results of repeated cellular endosymbiosis where a unicellular organism consumed a prokaryote that eventually becomes a useful part of the host cell instead of its food.
Considering the two facts above and how often multicellular organisms and unicellular organisms interact, it's highly improbable that any multicellular organism would have evolved without developing a life sustaining dependence on a huge array of unicellular organisms. I would be very surprised if that happened.
I'm not dismissing your remark. Any day where you don't learn at least one new thing is a day wasted. But given the mathematical odds, what you said seems inevitable to me rather than a surprise.
Thanks for the additional detail! It is really fascinating to think about not just the individual traits but the collective traits and behavior of life across Earth that got it where it is today. Indeed, I'm not surprised so much at finding life in all the cracks on earth (there is life even deep in the crust!) but moreso I didn't realize the scope of it (interior biomes, exterior biomes, etc). Really cool stuff. Makes me appreciate the trees even more.
Do you have a source for this? I was under the impression that the scientific consensus today was that multicellular life only appeared once.
> multicellular life only appeared once
Simple Multicellularity is estimated to have evolved at least 20 and probably more than 50 times for independent events of simple multicellularity.
Complex multicellurarity at least six times (animals, plants, fungi, brown and red algae).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicellular_organism
One has to imagine that there were a substantial number of misfires along the way too. Multi-cellular organisms that popped up and died for one reason or another before they had a chance to reach escape velocity. Like an amoeba that eats a bacteria and incorporates it but the mud puddle they are in dried up.
Wouldn’t surprise if for us to know about 50 at this point there were orders of magnitude more that we’ll never know of.
> I was under the impression that the scientific consensus today was that multicellular life only appeared once.
If that's the case, then the relevant Wikipedia article [1] will need a major correction. They reference multiple sources which are more likely to interest you.
Multiple independent emergence of multicellular life didn't really surprise me, considering how often unicellular life mutates. I'm actually surprised by the suggestion that the opposite is the current scientific consensus. Do you have any sources for that? (Not a challenge. Just want to understand the situation and misconceptions if any.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicellular_organism#Occurre...
Perhaps you think about animals, which have appeared only once, i.e. multicellular living beings capable of complex movements.
There are a lot of other kinds of multicellular living beings, which have achieved multicellularity independently, plants and fungi being the most obvious on dry land, but most of these other multicellular life forms had to lose mobility when becoming multicellular.
Only a few have retained some limited mobility when multicellular, e.g. the slime molds, but they are much simpler than those which have lost completely mobility, by having rigid cellular walls, like plants, fungi and several distinct kinds of marine algae.
There are even several kinds of (very simple) multicellular bacteria, among Cyanobacteria (blue-green algae), Myxobacteria (resembling slime molds) and Actinobacteria a.k.a. Actinomycetes (resembling fungi).
You might be thinking of the genesis of eukaryotes, which is thought to be from a specific event where one archaeon incorporated a bacterium, and all eukaryotic organisms are descended from the resulting symbiotic arrangement, with our nuclear DNA descending from the archaeon, and our mitochondria descending from the bacterium.
All multicellular life is eukaryotic, but not all eukaryotes are multicellular, e.g. amoebae.
It's even theorized that the genesis of the entire Eukaryota domain and many of its organnelles (notably mitochondria and chloroplasts) are the results of repeated cellular endosymbiosis where a unicellular organism consumed a prokaryote that eventually becomes a useful part of the host cell instead of its food.
A parallel could be drawn with CVCs acquiring startups. Or tiger penis soup. Neither being generally palatable dinner table conversation, but both similarly unlikely consumptive cultural concepts!
Supposedly they also emit ultrasonic sounds when lacking water, or getting leaves cut (ie reacting to stress), and some animals can hear them, and some trees release pheromones to warn others about predation and downwind plants can pick this up and make themselves more bitter by ramping up tannin production. Plants are more interesting than they seem.
I guessed this!!!!
I know insects also have their own microbiomes
Trees(softwoods) have greater genetic variability between indivuals of the same species than humans, which made prosecuting "log jacking" much easier, as a simple chip could be taken from each log at a mill or on a truck and matched to stumps of trees taken illegaly. The great variability amongst indivuals makes genetic matching, fast and cheap.
This is relevant to the discussion as it poses the idea that greater variability in the biomes of indivual trees could be partly liked to greater genetic variability of the trees themselves. If so, the value of intact large forests is then increased, and may point to non linear decreases in other forsest species.
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?
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)
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.
Can we get lab made wood then ?
1. Get a lab 2. Fill floor with soil. 3. Plant tree 4. Water
tada
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.
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.
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.
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?
Domain of Science just put out a great new "Map of" video that shows how fungi are up in everything:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FqFg-rjzPo
https://archive.ph/FqrQ9
thank you