Harvey Black | Mar 9, 2003 | 6 min read
Mono Lake, Courtesy of Jonathan P. Zehr, University of California, Santa Cruz They are the oldest forms of life, and by sheer quantity, they dominate the planet. But how bacteria and archaea interact with each other and their environment is essentially unknown. "It's really difficult to understand how the natural world functions if we don't know its most abundant and diverse component," says Matthew Kane, who runs the National Science Foundation's microbial program. Ninety-nine percent of the