Are coral reefs teeming with invisible treasure?!
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science saying…
Yes! And what a bonanza: bacteria with special properties that we can use as tools! For example, some bacteria have anti-tumor properties. We just have to look for them.
So Fabienne Wiederkehr and team from ETH Zürich went panning for gold… so to speak.
They searched one-hundred reefs across thirty islands in the Pacific Ocean. This yielded over FOUR THOUSAND unique bacteria! By analyzing their DNA, they realized most of the species were previously unknown!
Next, checking for useful properties.
Stay tuned… they might just hit it big and cure what ails ya!
Wiederkehr, F., Paoli, L., Richter, D., Racunica, D., Ruscheweyh, H.-J., Sperfeld, M., O’Brien, J., Miravet-Verde, S., Streiff, A. B., Ransome, J., Chepkirui, C., Priest, T., Sintsova, A., Salazar, G., Bistolas, K. S. I., Sawyer, T., Labadie, K., Mayer, K.-I., Perdereau, A., & Reddy, M. M. (2026). Coral microbiomes as reservoirs of unknown genomic and biosynthetic diversity. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10159-6