MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
What if solutions to some of the planet's biggest problems could be found inside some of its smallest creatures? That is the bet a team of researchers is making, and it's led them to places both remote and, lately, rather familiar. Here's NPR's Ari Daniel.
ARI DANIEL, BYLINE: There are spots where the Earth's inner rumblings burble to the surface, like Manitou Springs in Central Colorado.
(SOUNDBITE OF WATER SPLASHING)
DANIEL: At this particular well, every few seconds, a burst of water surges out of a narrow pipe, splashing into a concrete basin.
So you can drink from this?
DOUG EDMUNDSON: Yes, you can.
DANIEL: Doug Edmundson heads the Mineral Springs Foundation.
EDMUNDSON: Tastes like iron. If you're a vampire, you'd be a fan.
DANIEL: Here above ground, that iron rusts, and it's dyed part of the basin a bright orange...
(SOUNDBITE OF SCRAPING)
DANIEL: ...Which James Henriksen, an environmental microbiologist at Colorado State University, is now sampling.
JAMES HENRIKSEN: 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.
DANIEL: Microbes teaming invisibly and improbably in these colorful puddles. Braden Tierney is looking on as well. He's a microbiologist at Harvard Medical School who says that microbes thrive in some of the most extreme places imaginable - that are, say, high-pressure or super cold or really salty.
BRADEN TIERNEY: Microbes are nature's alchemists. So they are capable of taking just about any chemical and turning it into something else to survive.
DANIEL: Several years back, Tierney began wondering whether he could harness these abilities of microbes somehow. So he cofounded a nonprofit called the Two Frontiers Project to search for microorganisms that could help solve some of our big problems.
TIERNEY: 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.
DANIEL: The hunt has taken the team to reefs in the Red Sea, springs across Colorado like this one and volcanic vents off Sicily, where they found a microbe that excels at sucking CO2 out of the air better than other carbon-fixing microbes they know of. And now the team suspects they may not need to travel quite so far to find other similarly useful organisms. They've now turned their attention to our homes.
CHRIS BEURET: I mean, you run into slimes and goops everywhere in my profession.
DANIEL: Chris Beuret 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, often the telltale accumulation of microbes.
BEURET: I would just refer to it as sludge, probably.
DANIEL: But one person's sludge is another person's startup.
(LAUGHTER)
DANIEL: James Henriksen says this sludge in the nooks and crannies of our homes may well contain habitats teeming with interesting microbial life.
HENRIKSEN: Weird, slimy things in shower heads, stuff growing in dishwashers and hot water heaters - they're really strange environments.
DANIEL: And potentially extreme environments around our homes and under our noses that have pressured microbes into finding ways of grabbing carbon to grow and survive. In other words, maybe something that holds a secret to reducing CO2 levels is your roommate.
REBECCA ESPINOZA: Please, come in. So...
DANIEL: Rebecca Espinoza is among the citizen scientists offering up samples from their homes.
ESPINOZA: So we're going downstairs.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: All right.
DANIEL: She lives in Loveland, Colorado, and Braden Tierney has come to pay her a visit today.
TIERNEY: OK, this is cool.
DANIEL: He samples a showerhead...
(SOUNDBITE OF SCRAPING)
DANIEL: ...And a drain in the basement.
ESPINOZA: Still looks really gross (laughter).
TIERNEY: But to a microbiologist, it's very exciting.
DANIEL: Tierney's team is reaching out to homeowners nationwide, and they've already received 47 curious snots and brews. As with all their samples, the researchers will sequence the DNA to census the microbes and determine whether any new species might be useful to us.
LISA STEIN: 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?
DANIEL: Lisa Stein is a climate change microbiologist at the University of Alberta. She says that scientists have bioprospected for novel microorganisms for decades. But she adds that microbes are constantly evolving, and she hasn't seen anyone sample in the home like this before.
STEIN: That's pretty innovative right there.
DANIEL: Still, the best way to bring down CO2 levels probably won't be found in your showerhead, but by reducing emissions. In the meantime, the hunt for a microbial marvel that can bail us out of our many messes continues. Ari Daniel, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF EMOTIONAL ORANGES SONG, "TALK ABOUT US (FEAT. ISAIAH FALLS)") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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