"Perhaps the coöperation that evolved for four billion years in the microbial world has not evolved in the macroscopic world because it is younger.
Biklé says: "We were so enamoured by what the microbial world had done with the soil in our garden that to find out my cancer was caused by a microbe, the HPV virus [Human papillomavirus], was completely destabilising, not just because it was cancer and it was very threatening, but also this whole duality of the microbial world hit me hard.
Assessing biodiversity in the microbial world has always been a difficult problem: not only are microorganisms inherently more difficult to examine and differentiate by classical methods, but it is also not clear if the theoretical taxonomic frameworks, applied to more familiar life forms, even apply to the diversity of microbial life.
One of my colleagues, the eminent microbiologist and microbial ecologist Norman Pace, says that his exploration of the microbial world has made him reluctant to share other people's microbiomes (Personal Communication).
Its existence in fungi – a rare if not unique case of bioluminescence outside the animal and microbial worlds – has posed more of a mystery.
Because of its ability to reveal the previously hidden diversity of microscopic life, metagenomics offers a powerful lens for viewing the microbial world that has the potential to revolutionize understanding of the entire living world.
It offers unprecedented vision of the identities, composition, dynamics, functions and interactions of the diverse microbial world and has become an important tool in many fields such as ecology, energy, agriculture and medicine.
The life-saving drugs, which held a great deal of promises during the 1940s to eradicate all the infectious life-threatening diseases in the world, have ceased to work, because of the increasing emergence of microbial strains invulnerable to them.
