Associated Faculty
Virtually every niche on earth is occupied by microbial communities of varying complexity. While larger organisms are limited in their expansion across different ecosystems, highly adapted microbes can be found even under the most extreme environmental conditions. Not only are microbial metabolisms involved in all major geochemical cycles, but also it is becoming increasingly clear that higher organisms, such as humans, animals and plants, depend largely on associated microbial communities in order to maintain health, growth and reproduction.
For the analysis of microbial functions in different environments, classic microbiology has long focused on the analysis and characterization of individual bacterial isolates. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that most functions within the different microbial ecosystems are being carried out through the dynamic interactions of multiple bacterial species and strains within complex microbial communities. Metagenomic sequencing projects that study genetic material, which is isolated directly from heterogeneous microbial populations in environmental samples, have opened the field to a new type of functional analysis that circumvents the need for isolation of individual bacterial strains. Currently, researchers at the Institute for Genomes Sciences are studying the ecology of different microbial communities from various environments, including extremely dry soils from the Atacama Desert, the plant-associated phloem microbiome of citrus trees, and the symbiotic microbial system that is associated with the marine sea squirt.
