A microbiome is just like it sounds, a tiny world inhabited by microbes. Microbiomes are simply communities of microbes that live in a particular place, like in soil or water, on a plant or in an animal's gut.

Microbes can be found almost everywhere. They live in the deep biosphere (kilometres below Earth's surface), soil, ocean, air, on and in animals and plants. There is almost no place that is microbe free, they can even live in nuclear reactors! Microbes exist in huge numbers: in soil, around 10,000 bacterial species and 1,000,000,000 individuals inhabit a single gram of soil, they have existed for over 3 billion years, and are incredibly diverse.

Whether they are living in your gut, hanging out in your garden or at the beach, microbiomes are important for the health and wellbeing of individual animals, plants and whole ecosystems. This is the reason we want to understand how bacteria interact with their environment and how we can help these interactions result in healthy systems. To do this we need to map which microbes live where and figure out what they are up to.

Microbes provide many beneficial functions, like taking nitrogen from the air and making it available to plants, suppressing crop diseases and providing us clean waterways. They're also used for making everything from cheese and beer to antibiotics. Better understanding the roles of microbes in retaining or removing nitrogen from soils may make fertiliser use more efficient and limit the amount of nutrients entering fragile systems, like the Great Barrier Reef.

Modern scientific methods allow researchers to collect information about environmental microbiomes. From a gram of soil or a litre of seawater it is possible to describe microbial diversity from thousands of microbial species by reading their DNA. This information can then be used to describe the samples' microbial inhabitants and their likely functions.

Several initiatives, including the Australian Microbiome (www.australianmicrobiome.com), are currently mapping microbial diversity from thousands of environmental samples globally.

Mapping diversity provides a compass to guide the search for novel microbial products and allows prediction of environmental change effects (climate, anthropogenic perturbation) on microbially controlled functions. Microbes and their products will be the source of important new biotechnological discoveries, including new enzymes and antibiotics, and will enable increases in agricultural efficiency, aid in ecological restoration and management and no doubt give rise to tasty new foods and beverages.

Response by: Andrew Bissett, CSIRO

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