Soil contains a huge number of very diverse living organisms such as worms, fungi and bacteria. Many of these organisms work for the benefit of agriculture by recycling organic water, cleaning pollution and transforming atmospheric dinitrogen gas into free fertilisers. So far soil organisms are underutilised because many organisms are not even identified, and their beneficial expertise is often unknown. Microbiologists Degrune et. al set up a new method that allows to distiguish microbial communities in soils cultivated with different cropping practices.
