These little microbes may help solve our big problems

Microbes are little alchemists that perform all manner of chemical reactions. A team of microbiologists co-founded a non-profit to try to harness those abilities to solve some of the world’s big problems — from carbon capture to helping coral reefs to cleaning up waste. Recently, the team turned their attention to the microbes living in people’s homes — on and in shower heads, drip pans, and hot water heaters. These rather extreme environments may have pressured microorganisms into surviving in ways that could be advantageous to humans. Science reporter Ari Daniel https://www.npr.org/people/297147967/ari-daniel takes us on a treasure hunt in miniature. This episode was produced by Hannah Chinn. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. The audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez. Interested in learning more about the weird and wonderful world of microbes? Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:18Speaker 00

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:23Emily Kwong?

  Hi, Short Wavers. Emily Kwong here with science reporter Ari Daniel. Hey, Ari.

• 0:27Speaker 02

  Hi, Emily.

• 0:28Emily Kwong?

  I hear you are taking us on a trip to Colorado for this story.

• 0:32Speaker 02

  You have heard correctly, to a special place just outside the bustling town of Manitou Springs, to a spot called Iron Spring. It's one of the places where you can actually hear the earth's inner rumblings burble to the surface as spring water. At this particular well, every few seconds, a burst of mineral water surges out of a narrow pipe, splashing into a concrete basin.

• 1:00Emily Kwong?

  Oh, so it's like an old timey water fountain made by nature.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a good way to think of it, Emily. There are people who do drink this water, but it's something of an acquired taste.

• 1:11Speaker 03

  Tastes like iron. If you're a vampire, you'd be a fan.

• 1:16Speaker 02

  This is Doug Edmondson. He heads the Mineral Springs Foundation. When we meet up for this story, he shows me how here, above ground, that iron rusts, which is why part of the basin is dyed a bright orange.

• 1:28Emily Kwong?

  Rust will do that. I remember my red Flyer wagon rusted with time.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And most folks are probably familiar with the idea of rust, where iron oxidizes, basically interacting with oxygen and water, turning into a reddish-brown substance. But recently, Emily, I learned there is so much more to rust than just a chemical reaction.

• 1:51Speaker 04

  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.

• 2:04Emily Kwong?

  Microbes.

• 2:06Speaker 02

  James Henriksen studies those microbes. He's an environmental microbiologist at Colorado State University. He's with me on this trip to Iron Spring as well, and he's eager to get samples of that rust. That's all the scraping that you're hearing.

• 2:20Emily Kwong?

  Wait, he's saying that microbes can live on rust?

• 2:23Speaker 02

  Actually, what he's saying is it's the microbes making the rust.

• 2:27Emily Kwong?

  Wow.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  And he's come to this well to collect some for science.

• 2:32Speaker 04

  Just like birders are constantly looking for birds, I'm constantly looking around for evidence of the things that we can't see, the microbes that are everywhere.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  Because these microbes that have adapted to extreme or unusual environments may have lessons to teach us.

• 2:52Emily Kwong?

  So today on the show, we're going on a treasure hunt for microbes.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  What if solutions to some of the world's biggest problems, like climate change, cleaning up hazardous waste, and growing crops in hostile environments, could be found inside some of the smallest creatures on Earth?

• 3:09Emily Kwong?

  You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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• 4:42Emily Kwong?

  Okay, Ari, today we are talking about microbes. These are single-celled organisms, super, super small, that have found a way to survive in the most unlikely of places, like on a rusted mineral well in Colorado. Where else?

• 4:55Speaker 02

  Well, microbes can thrive in some of the most extreme environments you can think of. Places that are, say, high-pressure, or super-cold, or really salty.

• 5:06Speaker 05

  Microbes are nature's alchemists. So they are capable of taking just about any chemical and turning it into something else to survive.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  Braden Tierney joined us for our little jaunt to the spring. He's a microbiologist at Harvard Medical School. And Emily, several years back, he began wondering whether he could harness the abilities of these little alchemists to soak up chemicals that are bad for the environment or capture rare earth metals that we need. So he and James co-founded a nonprofit called The Two Frontiers Project to search for microorganisms that could help solve some of our big problems.

• 5:46Speaker 05

  We travel to sites all around the world where there is microbial life, we think, living that's going to be useful for things like carbon capture or helping corals or improving agriculture.

• 5:59Emily Kwong?

  That's quite a venture. Okay, well, where have they gone and what have they found?

• 6:03Speaker 02

  Well, the hunt's taken the team all over the place. They've gone to coral reefs in the Red Sea. They've traveled to the soils of the Mojave Desert and to springs across Colorado like this one. And even, get this, to volcanic vents off of Sicily where they found a microbe that excels at sucking CO2 up very efficiently.

• 6:27Emily Kwong?

  That sounds like a promising microbe for our purposes.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  Indeed, and they've even named, nicknamed, this carbon dioxide-sucking microbe Chonchus.

• 6:37Speaker 05

  To put it very simply, it grows fast. And it sinks.

• 6:41Emily Kwong?

  Wait, how, what does Chonkis do?

• 6:44Speaker 02

  Chonkis absorbs more carbon dioxide than a lot of other microbes. And then it drops to the bottom of the water column, where it can be collected and disposed of easily. Braden and his team think this thing, Chonkis, could make an ideal candidate for scaling up to, perhaps one day, suck down large amounts of planet-warming CO2 from the air.

• 7:08Emily Kwong?

  Hmm, I love that for us and for Chonkis.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:11Emily Kwong?

  And is Chonkis a one-of-a-kind, like a miracle microbe?

• 7:15Speaker 02

  Well, they don't think so. Braden says he and his team have already isolated microbes with a, quote, "wide range of physiologies" that are similarly unique and useful. And that includes other bacteria that are capable of grabbing carbon out of the air and still others that are associated with corals that appear to produce antibiotics.

• 7:36Emily Kwong?

  Yeah. In their efforts to prospect for microbes, it sounds like they've also had to travel to some pretty far-flung places. I mean, you're mentioning deserts and volcanoes.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Yes, though not always, Emily. Actually, more recently, the team has turned their attention to our homes.

• 7:53Emily Kwong?

  What?

• 7:54Speaker 02

  Which, you may well know, Emily, are full of microbes.

• 7:58Emily Kwong?

  Do I know that?

• 7:59Speaker 02

  Well, you do now.

• 8:01Speaker 04

  I mean, you're running slimes and goobs everywhere in my profession.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Chris Burey worked in facilities maintenance for years, including in Colorado. And he says it's inevitable that pipes clog and drip pans fill with snotty goo, which are often the telltale accumulation of microbes.

• 8:19Speaker 04

  I would refer to it as sludge, probably. But one person's sludge is another person's startup.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  Okay, remember James Henriksen from earlier?

• 8:28Emily Kwong?

  Oh, yeah, he's the guy who's like a birder, but for microbes.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  That's the one. So James first got the idea to search for these sludges in the nooks and crannies of our homes when he ran across a paper that documented something that he says-

• 8:42Speaker 04

  Just had to be horrifying for the person and hilarious for the scientists. This person had slimy tentacles that kept growing back out of their shower head.

• 8:52Emily Kwong?

  Oh, that's gross.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  That gotcha. And these sludges, while gross, may also have a silver lining.

• 9:01Emily Kwong?

  How? How could they possibly?

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Well.

• 9:04Speaker 04

  Weird slimy things in shower heads, stuff growing in dishwashers, hot water heaters. They're really strange environments.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  And these potentially extreme environments around our homes and under our noses have pressured microbes into finding ways of grabbing carbon to grow and survive.

• 9:23Emily Kwong?

  So what I'm hearing from you, Ari, is that I do not have to clean as much because I'm building the next generation of planet-saving sludge.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  That's one interpretation, Emily. I'll give you another. And that is that these researchers are hopeful that something that perhaps holds a secret to reducing CO2 levels could well be living in your pipes.

• 9:45Speaker 06

  Please, come in. So.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  Rebecca Espinoza is among the community scientists offering up samples from their homes to the Two Frontiers Project for James, Braden, and their team to study. And they're letting us visit on this particular day.

• 9:59Speaker 06

  So we're going downstairs.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  She lives in Loveland, Colorado, about a half hour drive from Fort Collins. And Braden has come to search her house for potentially planet-saving sludge.

• 10:11Speaker 05

  OK, this is cool.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  He samples a shower head, scraping for microbial delicacies. And then he goes after a drain in her basement.

• 10:22Speaker 06

  It looks really gross.

• 10:24Speaker 05

  But to a microbiologist, it's very exciting.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  Braden's team reached out to homeowners nationwide.

• 10:29Emily Kwong?

  Can I participate? Not a homeowner, but I definitely have some sludge.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Well, unfortunately, the project's now closed. But before they shut things down, they received over 70 curious snots and bruises. As with all their samples, the researchers sequenced the DNA to census the microbes and determine whether any new species might be useful to us. Because hacking the adaptations of microbes for our purposes is complicated.

• 10:56Speaker 07

  Microbes are amazing at what they do. But can we get their processes into a system that's economically competitive that we can scale and deploy?

• 11:07Speaker 02

  Lisa Stein is a climate change microbiologist at the University of Alberta in Canada. She says that scientists have been looking for novel microorganisms for decades, actually. So the Two Frontiers Project is kind of like a shot in the dark. But she also told me that microbes are constantly evolving, and she hasn't seen anyone sample in the home like this before.

• 11:30Speaker 07

  Kudos to them for having that idea. Like, that's, that's pretty innovative right there.

• 11:35Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, I kind of agree. Like, not all heroes wear capes, and they could be living in our houses. But, but it sounds like we won't be seeing them sold as products or on the market anytime soon.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  Right. And I need to mention that the best way to bring down CO2 levels probably won't be found in your showerhead, but rather by reducing emissions, the largest of which remains transportation. And what's more, carbon capture efforts, at least so far, have proved to be energy intensive and difficult to scale. That's something that James told me, too. This idea that the path from microbial discovery to widespread deployment is a long one.

• 12:16Speaker 04

  We have to be focused on things that can work in the real world, not just discovering organisms that are interesting for their own sake.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  And so the hunt for a microbial marvel that can bail us out of our many, many messes continues.

• 12:33Emily Kwong?

  Ari, Daniel, thank you for coming on Short Wave.

• 12:35Speaker 02

  My pleasure. Anytime, Emily.

• 12:39Emily Kwong?

  Short wavers, if you like this episode, give us a follow. It really helps the show. Also, check out our episode on worm blobs found in toxic cave water and the hunt for future medicines in the ocean's depths. We'll link them in our episode notes.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  And if you want to learn more about a new initiative from the Two Frontiers Project that you could get involved with, check out our show notes as well.

• 13:01Emily Kwong?

  Thank you for listening to Short Wave from NPR. See you next time.

• 13:11Speaker 03

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