Advanced Microbe Isolation Laboratory

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Award Abstract - 9977469Advanced Microbe Isolation Laboratory This grant will support the integration of existing instruments in new ways to provide an automated facility for culturing microbial cells from nature. Both in design and function, this facility will be unique. Many scientific fields - medicine, environmental microbiology, industrial chemistry, exobiology and genomics - have been impacted by the past decade of discoveries of novel uncultured microbial diversity in the natural world. The key to these discoveries was the use of genetic techniques to detect microorganisms that had never been cultured in scientific laboratories. The strategy of the new facility will be to miniaturize the process of culturing microorganisms, and apply genetic probes to systematically search for cultures of cell types that have been shown to be common on earth but phylogenetically remote from any organism studied previously in scientific laboratories. The Advanced Microbe Isolation Laboratory (AMIL) will use robotic technology to isolate and identify microorganisms in cultures that have organic carbon concentrations and cell densities that are 1000 fold lower than standard laboratory conditions. The central instrument in this laboratory will be a flow cytometer integrated with robotics for handling and sampling from arrays in microtiter dishes. The instrument was designed to screen a very large number of chemical variables and replicates. The facility will also include incubators and cryogenic equipment for storing and distributing cultures. A consortium of investigators will use the facility to produce data on the probabilities of culturing cells, and to systematically investigate combinations of cells of different species, to identify microbial consortia that depend on intra-species interactions, and to identify patterns of positive and negative interference caused by the production of compounds such as siderophores, quorum sensing compounds, and antibiotics.