Milestones in order. This is history, not a weekly activity grid.
- Frank names mycorrhiza
- Winogradsky chemolithotrophy
- Hellriegel nodules
- Lipman soil biology
- Streptomycin
- Soil as gene mine
- Metagenomes begin
- Global soil maps
Darker cells mean a higher score for this topic on that metric.
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Quick answers
Where should I start with Soil microbes?
Read Identity → How they live → Body & health, then use compare rails.
Is this page advice for Soil microbes?
Public-health education — not a care plan, prescription, or outbreak briefing.
What does the local lens add?
It names everyday desks for Beneficial allies before English norms look universal.
Are the scores a ranking of Soil microbes?
No — editorial 0–100 browsing aids inside this atlas only.
How do I compare Soil microbes to neighbours?
Use related cards and best-of / quiz rails after the first three chapters.
Which chapter is densest?
How they live and Body & health carry mechanisms; skim Identity first.
Nineteenth-century chemists already knew soil breathes. The twentieth added names, antibiotics and then too much DNA.
Frank's mycorrhiza (1885) and Hellriegel's nodules taught that roots are not alone.
Timeline
Albert Bernhard Frank coins mycorrhiza for fungus-root unions.
Sergei Winogradsky shows microbes can live on inorganic chemistry.
Nitrogen fixation in legumes is tied to living root nodules.
Early textbooks treat soil as a biological system, not mere dirt.
Selman Waksman's lab isolates a soil-derived tuberculosis drug.
After rRNA methods spread, soil becomes a catalogue of unseen lineages.
Direct DNA from soil skips culture.
Consortia try to map soil biomes the way oceans were mapped.
History is farms, compost and the clinic's debt to dirt.
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