As scientists understand more about microbes, it seems that the miniscule life forms have the potential to contribute to a host of useful activities—making biofuels, fighting human disease, improving high tech, you name it!

Now, a feature article in the September issue of Scientific American looks at how soil microbes could revolutionize agriculture.

Soil microbes include everything from bacteria to fungi, and article author Richard Conniff likes to call the lot collectively “the agribiome.” These microscopic life forms have the potential to solve many crises facing agriculture today—everything from climate change and drought to Salmonella and other food-bourn illnesses, from the costs of man-made fertilizers to the GMO controversy.

Conniff’s article comes on the heels two other papers that highlight the importance of soil microbes. In a paper published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of British scientists emphasizes how important soil microbe diversity is for European crops. And two weeks ago, American researchers determined that soil microbes are responsible for controlling carbon in the soil—an important factor in retaining the important mineral in the dirt as temperatures rise and the climate warms.

The Scientific American article gives many examples of these crucial, unseen microbial workers. Bacteria found in soil on the United States West Coast can kill Salmonella, Conniff reports, so the USDA is looking at introducing the bacteria in East Coast soils to stop the occasionally deadly outbreaks.

And instead of genetically modifying actual crops to withstand drought conditions, Mexican scientists are looking at modifying bacteria to strengthen the plants in the soil at their roots.

Mycorrhizal fungi in the soil are heroes in both the SciAm article and the PNAS study. The fungi deliver much-needed phosphate to crops, an easier and cheaper way to get the important mineral to the plants to help them grow. Artificial fertilizers can be expensive, especially for farmers in developing countries, and harm the natural soil ecosystem. Run-off from these fertilizers also contaminates freshwater and marine environments. A simple animation of how the fungi works to help plants is available here.

(Mycorrhizal fungi also play a heroic role in the next Academy planetarium show! Currently in production and set for a fall 2014 opening date, the latest production from our visualization studio will highlight the complex relationships in ecosystems—and how humans fit into the picture.)

If farmers and scientists can acknowledge that collaborating with microbes can play a crucial role in farming, “we will have come a step closer to feeding a hungry world,” Conniff concludes.

The lead author of the PNAS paper, Franciska de Vries, says, “This research highlights the importance of soil organisms and demonstrates that there is a whole world beneath our feet, inhabited by small creatures that we can’t even see most of the time. By liberating nitrogen for plant growth and locking up carbon in the soil they play an important role in supporting life on Earth.”

Mycorrhizal fungi image: Nilsson et al. BMC Bioinformatics

The excitement in August of NASA’s Curiosity rover landing on the surface of Mars, inducing “seven minutes of terror,” is tricky to sustain four months into the mission. Instead of technologically savvy rocket engineering, now it’s all about the science—mostly chemistry, in fact. But last month, John Grotzinger, project scientist for the mission, generated a lot of interest by saying on NPR, “This data is gonna be one for the history books. It’s looking really good.”

But revealing those data had to wait until today, the first day of the annual American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting here in San Francisco. And despite several reports that the news would be much ado about nothing, the press conference was held in a room almost ten times the size of the normal press conferences.

Of course, the biggest questions about Mars center around whether life exists on our nearest neighbor—or did it exist at some point in the past?

So, what did Curiosity find…?

A suite of Curiosity’s scientific instruments called SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) has detected organic compounds in the soil… That’s the good news. However, those organic compounds have not yet been determined to come from Mars. Scientists must be very careful to ensure that these compounds are not the result of contamination from here on Earth. In addition, the researchers want to make sure that the chemicals truly originated on the Red Planet rather than from, say, cosmic dust.

Curiosity dug the soil from five different places at the Rocknest location—scooping just a few inches into the soil and sending it to different instruments within the rover. Curiosity’s team selected Rocknest as the first scooping site because it has fine sand particles suited for scrubbing interior surfaces of the arm’s sample-handling chambers. Sand was vibrated inside the chambers to remove residue from Earth. Funny to think that you can “clean” instruments with dirt.

Using mass spectroscopy, the SAM instruments discovered several chemicals in the soil, including water, carbon dioxide, oxygen, perchlorate, and sulfur dioxide. The carbon-based materials inspire the most caution in scientists. They want to make certain that these building blocks for life are indeed indigenous to the red planet.

So what next for Curiosity? It will drill at the Rocknest site and then move on to Mount Sharp, where more soil testing will potentially collect further clues about organic compounds on Mars.

Grotzinger reminded the packed press conference that, “Curiosity’s middle name is Patience.” And instead of seven minutes of terror, the true science mission is “three months of tension.” If not more… Stay tuned.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS