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С�����Ƶ 50% of people around the world rely on groundwater for drinking. It usually contains between 10⁴ and 10⁵ microbial cells per milliliter, and those microbial communities are shaped by and interact with the environment in which they develop. The exact distribution of organisms and the chemistry and physics of the water, including pH levels and temperature, vary between different aquifers.

The effect of those environmental differences on the microbiomes is what Emil Ruff at the University of Chicago–affiliated Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and colleagues were hoping to study.