What you’re missing is that Linnaean taxonomy breaks down when discussing bacteria, and the line between strain/species doesn’t really exist.
Bacteria swap a lot of genetic material asexually, including across dramatically different species. Pathogenicity can also be dramatically modulated by presence of other species and environmental conditions.
The idea of a particular strain or species of bacteria being inherently pathogenic in a binary yes/no way is a surprisingly flimsy and unhelpful one.
Even if we ignore any ethical concerns, when you’re sampling from an extreme environment, the strains you’re finding will, with >99.9% certainty, have substantially diverged from a biologically identical ancestor that’s spent a fair number of generations infecting hosts.
So you also get a weird Ship-of-Theseus type question of “are these still really the same bacteria?”. And if you assume they are going to be different strains after adapting to different environments, then you can also safely assume that whatever strain you’re sampling in an extreme environment has a >99.9% probability of being in the potentially-harmful, contextually-harmful, or non-harmful bucket, by virtue of the fact you found it isolated in the wild rather than in living hosts.
To put it a little more simply: if you’re looking for something with a demonstrated ability to infect people, you’ll probably find that inside or nearby people, not in an icy, remote cave.
That didn’t answer whether these particular bacteria are pathogenic.
It does to the target audience.
What you’re missing is that Linnaean taxonomy breaks down when discussing bacteria, and the line between strain/species doesn’t really exist.
Bacteria swap a lot of genetic material asexually, including across dramatically different species. Pathogenicity can also be dramatically modulated by presence of other species and environmental conditions.
The idea of a particular strain or species of bacteria being inherently pathogenic in a binary yes/no way is a surprisingly flimsy and unhelpful one.
I don’t want to know if these bacteria are potentially pathogenic. I want to know if they’re pathogenic.
How are you distinguishing those ideas?
Are we talking about “has actually been found infecting human patients”?
Yeah, I really didn’t think that through. I guess we can’t go testing them on random people.
Even if we ignore any ethical concerns, when you’re sampling from an extreme environment, the strains you’re finding will, with >99.9% certainty, have substantially diverged from a biologically identical ancestor that’s spent a fair number of generations infecting hosts.
So you also get a weird Ship-of-Theseus type question of “are these still really the same bacteria?”. And if you assume they are going to be different strains after adapting to different environments, then you can also safely assume that whatever strain you’re sampling in an extreme environment has a >99.9% probability of being in the potentially-harmful, contextually-harmful, or non-harmful bucket, by virtue of the fact you found it isolated in the wild rather than in living hosts.
To put it a little more simply: if you’re looking for something with a demonstrated ability to infect people, you’ll probably find that inside or nearby people, not in an icy, remote cave.