Many deep subsurface microbes like Bathyarchaeota, MBG-D, and Lokiarchaeota are dominant yet dormant in global marine sediments. The point of dormancy is that you get to grow someday. But we haven’t seen them growing in nature – UNTIL NOW!!! But, first, I have a face palm. 1/9 https://twitter.com/animalculum/status/1309210776046010370

The figure that ended up in the thumbnail is the wrong figure (my fault). Here’s the right one. It’ll come out soon in AEM as an erratum. I can’t believe I missed it in all the revisions and proofs. But I have a second face palm to tell you about . . . 2/9

The ratio of fraction read abundance times cell count shows percent population increase, with the reasonable assumption that the bias that tweaks how many sequences you see from a particular microbe is constant in adjacent sediments. Face palm #2 is . . . 3/9

The other microbes in the background might matter. If there’s a takeover of a very low bias or a very high bias organism, this will also affect the ability of your microbe to compete for available sequences, even if its own bias term is the same. 4/9

Michael McLaren at NCSU kindly explained this error to me; you can read about this fascinating statistical twist in his manuscript. Happily for me, and for our understanding of deep subsurface microbes, Michael pointed out that we’re probably OK. 5/9 https://elifesciences.org/articles/46923 

This is because the population changes of the microbes are so subtle over adjacent sediment depths that the effect is likely to be miniscule when summed over all the microbes present in the sample. 6/9

We were also able to replicate our results with qPCR, which wouldn’t be subject to this issue. Also, we got good replication in multiple cores. And in multiple enrichments, tracking populations in real time. So, with that cringey preamble, I would like to suggest . . . 7/9

that the place that these deep subsurface clades grow, pass their genes along, and undergo natural selection, is in shallow sediments! Possibly very shallow – like less than the length of a candy bar (sorry, I’m hungry). 8/9

Ironically, the <<champions of the deep>> might dream of getting kicked back up to the surface in a slumping event so they can get to their “summer” in very shallow sediments. We did this work at the coast– it’d be nice to see if it works in the open ocean too. 9/9

I'm so incredibly pissed off that US laws are written to allow people to be shot in their own beds with impunity, with the explicit goal of dehumanizing Black people. 10/9