For us humans, cannibalism is to say the least, unappetizing. For bacteria though, it’s just another Tuesday. 

 In fact, understanding how bacteria "eat" their dead neighbors can help us mitigate climate change.

Climate change is driven by increased carbon dioxide in the air, so increasing natural processes of removing, and keeping carbon out of the atmosphere is an important goal. 

Carbon moves from the air into plants, then belowground where microbes like bacteria break down that plant carbon. Belowground carbon is a good thing, as soils currently hold more carbon than is in plants and air, combined.

 If we can get microbes to increase belowground carbon storage even more, it could help reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide and combat climate change. 

This is easier said than done. In just a handful of soil, there can be more bacteria than there are humans on this planet, and a vast number of bacterial species. Currently, only about 1 % of all bacteria can be isolated and grown in the lab, the other 99 percent being discovered through DNA sequencing. 

So, digging into this complexity at a microscopic and molecular scale, which has global impacts, is a bit tricky. 

At Berkeley lab, we are working on just that. We’ve found that when bacteria die, that dead biomass (necromass) plays a big role in creating long-lasting carbon belowground, and it might be because of bacterial cannibalism.  Often, bacteria don’t have a lot of options when it comes to food, so they readily cannibalize their neighbors. This necromass is transformed into carbon compounds that sticks around, because it seems to really bind to minerals, which helps it stay put for a long time.

I’m digging deep into this complexity of both diverse living and dead bacteria, and how living bacteria eat the dead, and what specific parts of necromass are mostly likely to stick to belowground minerals. 

I’m also creating necromass mixtures (sorry, some bacteria were harmed in the making of this media), that we can use in the lab to isolate and learn more about functionally important, but until now, unculturable bacteria.  Turns out, a lot of bacteria just can’t grow in the lab without a bit of good ol’ cannibalism. 

Bacteria are small, they are complex and diverse, and they are what they eat. 

But what’s on their plate can have a positive impact on a global scale. 

We really like to think that we are supposed to save the planet. A long time ago, dinosaurs were all around the place. One day – kaboom, and they were gone. The planet was just like – “ooops, sorry, it was just a home delivery”. So, don’t worry, the planet is doing just fine. We might be in trouble. Who knows, maybe we were sent here just to make some plastics, or perhaps to cause climate change.

Fortunately, Berkeley Lab has one of the best groups of environmental scientists in the world. They are carefully tracking what’s going on. To provide us with the best predictions, they need snowpack and precipitation data. Traditionally, snowpack measurement involves digging a pit, and characterizing it with the number of fingers you can stick in. On the contrary, precipitation measurement equipment costs a small fortune.

My team decided to completely change their gadgets, and make something like smartphones for them. A small device to measure it all. With the introduction of car radars, we managed to lighten their backpacks, and reduce the equipment cost by 55 times.

My job is to make those radars transmit specific electromagnetic waveforms, and to analyze reflections. It allows you to see inside the snowpack from the surface, and identify different layers. If you point the radar towards the sky, you can spot snowflakes or raindrops, and measure their velocity. We tested it in a controlled environment, and it works like a charm – with a millimeter precision.

The tricky part is isolating the useful signal from a noisy environment with plenty of reflections, or capturing kinetic energy of raindrops. To handle these difficulties, we are developing AI models, and collecting data using sensor networks from our stations in Alaska and Colorado. Once we fully master this approach, environmental scientists will be able to better understand phenomena like floods, erosion, landslides, avalanches, etc. It will also enable first responders to quickly find people after an avalanche.

But, just like any other, this technology will not save the planet. It will help us better understand the environment, save some habitats, homes and lives. And that fact alone means - somebody’s entire world.