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La Puna, a high-altitude plateau straddling Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, is not for the faint of heart. Visitors must endure a 10-hour drive from the closest city, battle altitude sickness at heights of 3,200 meters or more, withstand harsh ultraviolet radiation and wildly fluctuating temperatures, and manage without—gasp—Wi-Fi or cell signal. But for those who brave the journey, the rewards are plenty.
The region is often described as other-worldly, with a topography likened to that of Mars, the Moon, or early Earth—it is, in fact, where scientists discovered our last universal common ancestor (LUCA), the microbe from which all life on the planet is said to have evolved. Roughly the size of France, La Puna boasts features varying from desert soils to salt marshes, active volcanoes to deep blue lagoons. “It’s an extreme place, but also very beautiful and unique,” says Elisa Bertini, who has made a multiple trips to La Puna over the past five years.
Beauty aside, Bertini is attracted to the plateau for another reason: It is teeming with extremophiles found nowhere else on Earth. Along with her colleagues at Puna Bio, a Buenos Aires-based startup, Bertini believes these hardy organisms—bacteria, algae, and fungi capable of living in hostile habitats—can play a role in humanity’s fight against environmental destruction and climate change by offering essential crops a means to survive, even thrive, in increasingly harsh conditions.
Since 2020, Puna Bio’s microbiologists have been studying how microbes found in La Puna’s plants and their surroundings can persist in conditions of high salinity, acidity, and extreme temperatures with minimal nutrients. The team’s aim? To harness these survival properties and transfer them, in the form of inoculants applied to leaves or seeds, to staple food crops around the world.
“We thought: If the extremophiles are helping plants in La Puna, then why can’t they help plants elsewhere?” says Bertini, who cofounded Puna Bio.
Last September, the firm launched what it calls “the world’s first extremophile biostimulant”—a treatment that farmers can directly apply to soybeans, one of Argentina’s main export crops. When seeds are mixed with Kunza Soja and planted, the microbes in this liquid stimulant (two bacterial strains isolated from La Puna) colonize the new plants, bolstering antioxidant production and the uptake of key nutrients while encouraging the growth of mycorrhizal fungi that live symbiotically with plant roots, which in turn helps improve soil health.
In over 70 trials conducted across more than 25,000 acres of farms in Brazil, Argentina, and the US corn belt, Kunza increased soybean yields by an average of 11 percent, nearly quadruple the gain of typical products on today’s market. “Think of Kunza as a probiotic for plants,” says Bertini.
A report published by the United Nations in 2022 estimates that up to 40 percent of all soils worldwide are moderately or severely degraded—a figure that could rise to 90 percent by 2050 if deforestation, overgrazing, intensive cultivation, urbanization, and other harmful practices persist.
“Soil degradation is a really pressing issue,” says Franz Bender, a soil ecologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. “Soil is the foundation of civilization because 95 percent of our food is derived from it.” The loss of fertile soil makes land less productive for agriculture, putting further pressure on global food supplies that are already threatened by a booming population, soaring input costs, and labor shortages. If soil degradation can’t be resolved, the risk is that ever more natural land will be converted to agriculture, deepening the world’s biodiversity crisis.
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“What’s more, our climate is becoming more extreme,” Bender says, noting that erratic weather patterns not only affect crops, but contribute to soil degradation as well. It seems nowhere is spared—Europe endured its hottest summer on record this year, causing the world’s largest producer of olive oil to run out of supplies; Argentina’s worst drought in a century has slashed soy and wheat harvests by half; and the Horn of Africa entered its fifth year of a devastating drought that has put 22 million people at risk of starvation.
Poor soils don’t just affect plants. In fact, 59 percent of all species on Earth live in soil, according to a 2023 study coauthored by Bender. “One teaspoon of soil contains more organisms than the people on this planet,” he says. This biodiversity, comprising a large portion of fungi and bacteria, is fundamental for the global cycling of phosphorus, nitrogen, and other nutrients, says César Marín, a soil and fungal root ecologist at the University of Santo Tomas in Chile.
On top of all of this, healthy soils are the third largest carbon sink on the planet—sequestering more carbon than the atmosphere and world’s vegetation combined—and they also protect against erosion, flooding, and water pollution. Pretty much everything that we need to survive on Earth—what we eat, drink, and breathe—can be traced back to the ground beneath our feet.
So addressing soil degradation is critical. Solutions being trialed include growing crops not for food but to cover the soil and slow erosion; planting two or more crops close together for better productivity and natural pest suppression; and reducing mechanical plowing to preserve soil structure and carbon content. Scientists are even creating more resilient plants using genetic engineering and employing precision agriculture that leverages automated data collection to fine-tune the management of crops. “It’s about changing the way the land is managed,” says ecologist Richard Bardgett at the University of Manchester.
“And, of course, there’s also rehabilitation of degraded soil—helping plants to reestablish to bring back life into the soil,” adds Bender. “This is where microbial inoculations come in.”
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Puna Bio believes extremophiles can offer plants an invaluable leg up in less-than-favorable conditions—allowing plants to do more when nutrients are scarce. “They have inhabited the planet for 3,500 million years and have evolved to live in an extreme environment where nutrients are really low,” says Bertini of the extremophiles. Coexisting with plants growing in degraded soils should therefore be simple for these microbes.
Microbes that Puna Bio has discovered are, for instance, able to fix and transform nitrogen earlier and more efficiently than bacteria typically found on plant root nodules. They also produce greater amounts of organic acids, which help solubilize soil phosphorus more effectively, as well as helping produce greater quantities of auxins (hormones that promote plant growth) and enzymes that combat oxidative stress. In addition, extremophiles exude antifungals and secrete siderophores, molecules that aid in iron uptake. The primary beneficiary is the growing plant, but once the growing season is done and these plants decompose into the soil, the quality gradually improves.
“Why these microbes perform better in the first place is because they produce a biofilm, which is like a glue that allows them to stick to the roots, outcompete other microorganisms, and start a symbiotic relationship with the plants. They even stimulate secondary root growth,” explains Bertini.
Such benefits mean “there’s a lot of interest in a product like Kunza,” says Luke Samuel, who manages R&D partnerships at the Farmers Business Network. Approximately 10 of its members from various US states across the Midwest have been involved in Kunza trials since 2021. “Growers are always looking for technologies that may benefit their farming operations … Kunza is very unique and has the potential to help farmers better manage stress, such as heat and drought,” Samuel says.
The potential of harnessing extremophiles isn’t limited to farming—today, they already help produce biofuels, remove stubborn stains, enable PCR testing, and combat drug-resistant bacteria. But this is the first time such microbes have been applied to agriculture.
To date, Puna Bio has amassed more than 1,000 extremophiles. More than 90 percent of these are from La Puna (collected on multiple visits over the years, at varying seasons), while the remainder are from Utah’s Great Salt Lake.
The firm builds its collection—which Bertini calls “the cornerstone of our company” and says is the only one existing in the world today—via a series of steps. The first involves prospecting a new area (as the company did just last month) to sample its plants, soil, water, rock formations, and other features. Back in the lab, the team carries out metagenomic sequencing, which reads all of the genetic material in a sample and helps identify the organisms present.
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The scientists then pick out the microbes that seem most promising. These are microbes “that have large plant-growth-promoting activities, like phosphorus solubilization or nitrogen fixation,” explains the firm’s CEO, Franco Martínez Levis, “as well as ones that are able to deliver in a wide variety of stressful conditions, like high salinity or temperature.” Such traits are gleaned by screening microbes to identify which known useful genes they possess and how many copies of such genes are present.
Candidate microbes are then isolated and grown in an appropriate culture medium to further study “why they are more resistant and much better compared to regular microbes,” says Bertini.
The end goal is to figure out how to get these microbes into products that will help farmers. It’s helpful, she says, to try to look for plants in the extreme environment that are comparable to the target crops. For instance, the two extremophiles present in Kunza were derived from plants that, similar to soybeans, are part of the legume family.
Extremophiles that demonstrate the “best performance” then pass through to the greenhouse phase, where they are applied to plants. “We analyze their colonization, different doses, and so on,” says Bertini. “Once we understand what is happening with the plant, we go to field trials. Then we optimize the formula for our product.”
Overall, such biological solutions for soil degradation are “a promising approach,” says Bender. “They’re much more sustainable than fertilizers.”
Kunza’s liquid formulation, which farmers can simply toss over seeds before sowing, is also incredibly convenient, says Ignacio Salgado, who works at German plant-breeding company KWS Group and previously worked in South America for over 10 years. Most farmers already have machinery capable of carrying out this mixing.
Other experts, however, are skeptical about how well such products will work in the real world. “In a greenhouse, they’ve got very careful conditions, and it’s not a complex microbial community that the extremophiles are competing with,” says Jacob Parnell, a soil diversity specialist at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. “But the truth of things is that once it gets out into the world, every soil is going to be different and have its own microbial community with different physical and chemical properties.”
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Then there’s the age-old worry of what happens when you throw a foreign species into the mix. “We don’t know the effects of introducing something new where it doesn’t belong,” says Marín.
Puna Bio takes these concerns in stride. The team isn’t worried about competition from existing soil microbes: “Imagine these extremophiles are athletes that train at a high altitude and develop extra capacities like better breathing,” says Levis. “So when they come to sea level, they have all these beneficial properties [over runners there].”
And in an analysis conducted last year, the firm discovered that Kunza doesn’t modify existing soil microbiota. Rather, it reorganizes it.
For now, Kunza exists only as a liquid, but Bertini’s team is exploring whether it can be packaged as granules, which would ease its export beyond Argentina (the only place it is licensed so far). They’re also developing products for corn, dry beans, sugarcane, and other crops. A liquid inoculant for wheat seeds is slated to be released next year. Additionally, the firm hopes to add a biological fungicide to its repertoire.
“If you’re familiar with football, we like to say that we are putting the Lionel Messi of microbes into soil,” says Bertini. It’s a lure so strong it keeps pulling her back to the spellbinding La Puna time and time again.
The world needs protecting, now more than ever. But preserving the natural world and advancing human knowledge requires innovative and pioneering solutions. In this series, WIRED, in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, highlights the individuals and communities working to solve some of our most pressing environmental and scientific challenges. Through the Perpetual Planet Initiative, Rolex supports those who go above and beyond to safeguard and preserve our planet for the next generations. #PerpetualPlanet #PlanetPioneers
Updated 10-20-2023 10:30 am BST: Richard Bardgett’s full name and affiliation were added.
