When millions of tiny organisms decompose dead plant material, they keep the global carbon cycle going. Together with colleagues from the Senckenberg – Leibniz Institution for Biodiversity and Earth System Research (SGN) and Justus Liebig University (JLU) in Giessen, researchers from Goethe University Frankfurt have developed a new method to identify the molecular tools that different species use for this process. Their analysis of over 18,000 species brought surprising discoveries to light: In addition to fungi and bacteria, some invertebrates also evidently have a whole range of such tools at their disposal, while the one or other fungus lost them when it became parasitic.