Extracellular enzyme activities provide a microbe’s-eye view of organic matter

Microbes sense the world on a considerably smaller scale, but with vastly higher chemical resolution, than humans do. This is a real impediment to understanding how microbes interact with ecosystems. New applications of extracellular enzyme assays can tell us what resources microbes need and how they’re getting them, at considerably higher resolution than more common geochemical techniques. I’ll argue that, by looking at the extracellular enzymes that microorganisms express, we can work toward a microbe’s-eye view of the environment.