SGER: Physical fractionation of marine microbes for efficient mining and description of microbial diversity

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The PIs plan to exploit large-scale concentration and serial, preparative fractionation techniques as a means to separate complex microbial assemblages into their component populations. The goal is to achieve high degrees of enrichment, or even purity, with a sufficient biomass yield to allow morphological, biochemical, and genomic analyses on individual microbial populations without cultivation. The work should result in the development of methods for more efficiently mining microbial diversity in complex microbial communities where many of the constituent populations are not readily cultivable. If successful, this work will make possible simultaneous analysis of the genome, proteome, and biochemistry of even uncultivated microbes. Successful purification of large amounts of biomass of selected populations without culturing will also allow analyses of natural isotopic ratios that could provide clues to the metabolic processes of those populations in situ.