But Peixoto found one aspect of the meeting particularly unsettling: in all the climate discussions, microbes were effectively omitted. “We should be looking at the most important player of the equation, the microbes. [All the climate crises] are driven by microbes, disturb microbes, or can be solved by microbes”, she recalls thinking. Yet, other microbiologists were so few and far between that she didn’t encounter a single one at either of the last two COP meetings.