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Jun 12, 2024

MIcro-societies need a break! (through)

Our interactions with Earth's wild micro-societies populating our  earth, wind and sea  are critical. We are degrading and destroying their societies. This affects their larger bretheren  of our macrosphere - affects us!

First step is understanding them

FROM NOAA:  Marine microbes (NOAA)  

FROM WHOI 

HOW THEY SPEAK

HOW WE ATTACK THEM

* Engineering viruses to destroy biofilms. Dr. Timothy Lu (scroll down that page to see descriptive images of what he's up to)





Definitions: (From Wikipedia, whose microbiology contributers seem pretty solid)

biofilm Environ Microbiol. 2005 Feb;7

Human attitude needs to broaden. As noted above most researchers looking deeply into the society and languages of the microbes are doing so as medical researchers, who identify the species they study as "bad" organisms. They are interested understanding the intricacies of the eukaryotic world's communication  so that they can disrupt it as a means of destroying  microbial communities and preventing future microcommunited from forming

Still what they have learned along the way is important, and it is important for microbiology researchers to  be able  to respond to the concerns of by deep ecologists of the overarching value of the rest of the microbes which are overwhelmingly friendly or oblivious of human beings. and our co-mega flora and fauna.

Micro species. How they defend themselves.
Biofilms and  Eukaryotic cell death programs.    Single celled organism exude a chemical 

Single celled organism exude a chemical that  directs an encroaching  eukaryotic cell's genetic machinery to shut  down. .



 it is not wholly unexpected that Gaia considers switching back planetary biomass to prokaryotes-only, .  

The communities of the one celled organisms with no cell nuclei, mitochondria or other "organelles" complicating their internal structure. Organisms that are capable of living interchangeably as individuals and as temporary multicellular communities. We call them "bacteria" and "archaea" (the latter being a fairly recently-differentiated  seperate one-celled kingdom)

Here are  some basics to set the stage for further considerations.  Links to backgrounders about this interesting society that are accessible to the general reader as well as the  meaning requiring only a general knowledge of the life sciences.  

A note on Kingdom-ism.  

To a carpenter, every problem is a nail, its said,and, with the majority of  those studying microspeech being within the biomedical disease fighting field, bacterial communication is bacterial outbreak needs its communication utterly disrupted, its defenses piercedevery challenge with bacteria  disrupting it and of destroying their communities. 

While comprehensible for the minuscule percent of prokaryotes that are "pathogenic",  it is important to try to limit attacks against quorum sensing to those disease species only, leaving the benign majority of prokaryotes unharmed.  Will that be possible? 

For it is likely that 
(1) The great flush of pharmaceuticals into our  rivers and coastal waters via sewage treatment plants that don't break down these chemicals will send them them in concentrated pulses into the receiving rivers and bays.  and 

(2) Another direction in anti-quorum sensing research is developing means of keeping bacteria from settling on aquaculture nets, ships' hulls,  piers  and other surfaces, thence providing an attractive substrate to settle on for larger organisms like seaweeds, mussels, sponges, barnacles , thus "fouling" the suerface.    How can that be done without  impacting the microcommunities carrying out this necessary function in the nearby coves or downstream places beyond those treated pilings and nets?

Ron Huber
Friends of Penobscot Bay: a Waterkeeper Alliance Affiliate
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