Environmental microbiology is commonly understood to be the study of living things that are too tiny to be seen by the naked eye, often known as the microbiome. Microbiologists emerged as a professional name to differentiate experts in the field from their counterparts in the macro world, such as biologists, zoologists, plant physiologists, palaeontologists, and many more. The carbon, nitrogen, and sulphur cycles on Earth are essentially the work of microbes. The field of industrial microbiology focuses on using microorganisms as a part of manufacturing processes to create commercially viable quantities of valuable end goods. Microorganisms in the soil are the focus of soil microbiology, which investigates the rhizosphere (the soil region immediately around a plant's root system) and how these microbes interact with plant and animal life. The study of extra-terrestrial or "non-deoxyribonucleic acid" life on Earth, as well as other planets and moons in our solar system, is known as astrobiology or exobiology and is a relatively recent scientific discipline.
