Anyone who has visited Yellowstone National Park—a geothermal wonder in the interior US—has been nothing short of mesmerized. But microbiologists love the thermal springs in this park for a reason other than their natural beauty: heat-loving microbes thrive here. In the late 1960s, an Indiana University scientist, Thomas Brock, isolated the bacterium Thermus aquaticus—the producer of the Taq polymerase enzyme that has since fueled countless PCR reactions worldwide, from these very pools. Ever since, researchers have been on a hunt for extremophiles in hopes of understanding their survival mechanisms in bizarre habitats and leveraging their secrets to resilience for human benefits. If you, like me, are a fan of extremophiles, you are in for a treat! In our cover story, we dive deep, metaphorically of course, to tell the stories of scientists who literally dive into deep oceans, spelunk into dark caves, and brave polar freezes in search of these fascinating creatures.
Ironically, while this set of researchers is out in the wild hoping to find novel microbes, there’s another set of scientists that continually monitors new microbes in the wild for an entirely different reason: They watch out for potential microbial threats that might infect humans. With COVID-19, the world witnessed how a virus can pop out of seemingly nowhere and grind the world to a standstill in its ambition to find new hosts and propagate. While no one could have predicted the exact nature and scale of the pandemic, virologists were never truly surprised.
With abundant, unknown microbial empires out in the wild that possess the ability to rapidly mutate, researchers know—and worry—that we are always one mutation or host-jump away from emergence of a novel infectious disease. So, researchers are on the lookout for pathogen X, an unknown microbe that can cause an infection outbreak: Disease X. It's a classic whodunnit, except that the chase starts before the culprit acts. Prepping for an invisible attacker who may strike at an unknown place at an undefined time is as difficult as it sounds, but researchers are doing it anyway. I am sure you will enjoy reading about the innovative approaches wherein researchers surveil animal leftovers, track viral genomes, and build pathogen prototypes to preemptively defeat Disease X.
While the Disease X defense tactics might be new, pathogen-discovery tools saving the day during a public health crisis is an age-old story. Columbia University epidemiologist Ian Lipkin, famously known as the "virus hunter" saw this pattern of basic research-enabled tools benefitting public health initiatives time and again. Read about his inspiring 40-year career in our profile story; from identifying 2,000 viruses to solving the SARS crisis in China, Lipkin has done it all.
Lastly, shifting gears from people to plants, I want to touch upon a unique story that has everything: a pink villain, a microbial weapon, and an underappreciated group of heroes. The story of how the pink bollworm—a pest that destroyed US crops—was eradicated from the US is a legendary saga: Farmers combined traditional approaches with Bacillus thuringiensis-powered biotechnology programs to finally win the century-long fight against the pest. Not all heroes wear capes; but if they did, they wouldn’t run out of cotton anytime soon.
