There are places where the Earth's inner rumblings burble to the surface — like Iron Spring, located just outside the bustling town of Manitou Springs in central Colorado.
Every few seconds, a burst of water surges out of a narrow pipe, splashing into a concrete basin that's partly dyed a bright orange.
"Whenever I see that color, I look very carefully because sometimes it's not chemistry that's forming that rust. It's biology — an entire world of unexplored and undiscovered microbes", says James Henriksen, an environmental microbiologist at Colorado State University.
Henriksen uses a metal file to sample the microorganisms teeming invisibly and improbably in the colorful puddles atop the basin. "Just like birders are constantly looking for birds," he says, "I'm constantly looking around for evidence of the things that we can't see — the microbes that are everywhere."
This uncanny ability of microbes "to survive and thrive in these unusual places," says Henriksen, got him wondering whether these miniscule organisms may hold the solutions to some of humanity's biggest problems.
One of Henriksen's former undergraduate students and current lab members, Kyndal Prahl, explains the idea is "taking the smallest parts of the world that you can't even see and manipulating these microbes for a bigger purpose."
So they and a small team of researchers have set out on the tiniest of treasure hunts to find remarkable microbes that can help bail us out of our many messes — and it's led them to places both remote and rather familiar.
Microbial alchemy
"Microbes are nature's alchemists," says Braden Tierney, a microbiologist at Harvard Medical School.
"They are capable of taking just about any compound or chemical anywhere in the world and turning it into something else to survive," he says. "Basically, they're transforming all the stuff that we might see as inert, metallic or wasteful into something that they can use to live."
This allows microbes to thrive in some of the most inhospitable places imaginable — like under high pressures or in the super cold or where it's really salty. The microorganisms living in these challenging environments are called extremophiles.
Several years back, Tierney began wondering whether he could harness these remarkable abilities of microbes somehow. He had run across a study from a bay next to the Aeolian island of Vulcano off Sicily, containing a series of shallow, volcanic vents, "just spewing carbon dioxide naturally into the ocean," he says.
And Tierney thought, "Wow, I'll bet there are microbes there that are really good at consuming CO2." So he and a small team joined up with the Sicilian scientists to return to the bay to sample the water for microbes.
"We ended up almost immediately finding a microorganism that was remarkably efficient at consuming carbon dioxide," he says. They affectionately call it Chonkus.
"To put it very simply, it grows fast and it sinks," says Tierney. And that means that Chonkus absorbs more carbon dioxide and then drops to the bottom where it can be collected and disposed of easily. This made it an ideal candidate for scaling up to, perhaps, one day, suck down large amounts of planet-warming CO2 from the air.
This discovery encouraged Tierney to believe that there must be other microbes out there doing any number of untold, remarkable things that humans could make use of.
So he and Henriksen co-founded a non-profit called The Two Frontiers Project to search for microorganisms that might pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to help mitigate climate change, grow crops in hostile environments, help dying corals mount a comeback, capture rare earth metals for human use and clean up hazardous waste sites.
Their mission is straightforward. "We travel to sites all around the world where there is microbial life," says Tierney.
The hunt has taken the team to coral reefs in the Red Sea, the soils of the Mojave desert, springs across Colorado, and the volcanic vents off Papua New Guinea. "Unusual places can be some of the most interesting places to discover something different," says Henriksen.
In fact, Tierney says he and his team have already isolated microbes with "a wide range of physiologies" that are similarly "unique and useful" to Chonkus. That includes other bacteria that are capable of grabbing carbon out of the air and still others associated with corals that appear to produce antibiotics.
The group suspects there are more helpful microbes out there, but they're thinking they may not need to travel quite so far to find places that are unusual. They've now turned their attention — to people's homes!
One person's sludge is another person's startup
"You run into the slimes and goops everywhere in my profession," says Chris Beuret, who teaches construction management at Colorado State University and worked in maintenance facilities for years, including Colorado, California and on ships in the Gulf of Mexico.
Beuret says he's seen innumerable pipes clog and drip pans fill with goo, which are often the telltale accumulations of microbes. The character of the slime varies by geography. For instance, in Florida, HVAC contractor Brian Orr has filled entire buckets with "this gelatinous glop." Recently, due to changes from copper to aluminum tubing, he and his team started observing something more akin to "elephant snot — a clear or white sort of goo that would build up really, really fast."
Henriksen first got the idea to search these sludges in the nooks and crannies of homes for microbial heroes when he ran across a paper that "had to be horrifying for the person and hilarious for the scientists. This person had slimy tentacles that kept growing back out of their showerhead."
He concluded that "the weird slimy things in showerheads, stuff growing in dishwashers, and hot water heaters, they're really strange environments."
And they may also be extreme environments as well, which could have pressured microbes into finding ways of grabbing carbon out of their surroundings to grow and survive. In other words, maybe something that holds a secret to reducing CO2 levels — is your roommate.
The Two Frontiers Project, in partnership with microbiome science company Seed and a global citizen science support platform called CitSci, is now reaching out to homeowners nationwide to survey their domiciles for interesting goos. They've already received 120 inquiries, from which they've solicited 47 curious snots and brews.
Emma Lopez, a rising senior at Colorado State University who works in Henriksen's lab, puts it like this: "It's the idea that anyone can be a microbiologist."
As with all their samples, the researchers will sequence the DNA of these microbes to census the organisms, search for new species, and determine whether any of them might be useful to humans.
Krista Ryon is a co-founder and the Director of Operations at The Two Frontiers Project, where she runs the group's genomic sequencing. She says that certain colleagues of hers are charged with keeping the billions of cells they collect alive and growing. "Whereas I immediately kill them where I open up the cells and I extract the DNA out of them," she says. "But we do that in order to form this picture of this community that's in the entire sample."
From microbial discovery to deployment
There's still a ways to go, however. Even if they are able to find another microbe or two with a superpower that humans can take advantage of, there's no guarantee these microorganisms can then be put to use to actually help.
"Microbes are amazing at what they do," says Lisa Stein, a climate change microbiologist at the University of Alberta. "But can we get their processes into a system that's economically competitive that we can scale and deploy?"
For instance, "once you have a microbe that eats carbon, you still have to do something with it," says Holly Jean Buck, an environmental social scientist at the University at Buffalo. Even if a microbe can trap carbon, "the carbon has to go somewhere," she says. There are a range of potential destinations, including mineralizing it as rock, storing it in the soil, or using it to produce fuels, but these are at different stages of development.
The approach that The Two Frontiers Project is taking, along with other groups doing similar work, isn't entirely new. Stein says scientists have bio-prospected for novel microorganisms for decades. In her view, this is "a shot in the dark because we have extensively covered many of these ecosystems in the past."
But Stein acknowledges that microbes are constantly evolving, especially in the face of a changing climate. And she hasn't seen anyone sample in homes like this before. "Kudos to them for having that idea," she says. "That's pretty innovative right there." Buck agrees that the effort is worth serious consideration. "I'm glad they're looking into it," she says. "I think all innovation involves some amount of uncertainty around what will pay off."
Still, the best way to bring down CO2 levels probably won't be found in your shower head, but by reducing emissions. Carbon capture efforts have so far proved to be energy-intensive and difficult to scale.
Back at Colorado State University, Henriksen agrees that the path from microbial discovery to widespread deployment is a long one. "We have to be focused on things that can work in the real world," he says, "not just discovering organisms that are interesting for their own sake."
He enters the walk-in refrigerator where he stores all the samples that he and the team have collected — from the volcanic vents and mineral springs half a world away to the condensation tubes and freezer drip lines in people's homes. It's a living library of microbes.
"I look at these shelves of little tubes and each one I know is just packed with DNA or microorganisms that can do amazing things," says Henriksen. "You just have to go out and explore — go out and discover."
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