Termite Metagenomics

So, you eat turkey, and termites eat wood. Turkey, even the dry stuff made by your great-aunt, is easy to digest. (To see who is helping you out, check this post.) Wood is much, much tougher. Well, today's issue of Nature has the 411 on the termite's gut-posse. Hundreds of species of bacteria doing incredible feats of metabolic biochemistry--an ecosystem of mutualists as we talked about in class!