Microbiomes of soils, plants and animals: an integrated approach

Published

2020

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

ISBN-13

9781108473712

ISBN-10

1108473717

Pages

235

Format

Hardcover

Language

English

"The study of microbes and how they interact with the environment and their hosts has a fascinating history. Remarkably, we first managed to visualise microorganisms over 300 years ago. In the mid seventeenth century, Robert Hooke used a microscope to present the first scientific depiction of a fungus (Hooke, 1665), and shortly thereafter, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek used a singlelens microscope to describe the 'animalcules' that we now know to have been bacteria and protists (Van Leeuwenhoek, 1677; Lane, 2015). Two hundred years later, Angelina Fanny Hesse pioneered the use of agar media instead of a gelatin-based alternative to culture bacteria (Hitchens & Leikind, 1939) that subsequently allowed the isolation of the bacterium responsible for tuberculosis (Koch, 1882)"--