Soil has has a microbiome just like the human gut! 🦠 These tiny living organisms, known as microbes, in our soil are key for helping plants break down and absorb nutrients. This is similar to how the microbes in our gut work! Interesting stuff isn't it? Healthy soil with lots of different microbes (microbial diversity) is key to growing more healthy and nutritious plants. Organic growing methods, which do not use artificial pesticides and herbicides, help this diversity to flourish. | Soil Asso

33 reactions · 3 comments | Probiotics are very popular these days...

Soil microorganisms carry out key processes for life on our planet, including cycling of carbon and other nutrients and supporting growth of plants. However, there is poor molecular-level understanding of their functional roles in ecosystem stability and responses to environmental perturbations. This knowledge gap is largely due to the difficulty in culturing the majority of soil microbes. Thus, use of culture-independent approaches, such as metagenomics, promises the direct assessment of the fu