Quantitative and Genetic Approaches to Microbial Diversity

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The Microbial Diversity course at the Marine Biological Laboratory (Woods Hole, MA) provides a unique training experience in which students from diverse backgrounds learn how to cultivate, isolate and critically study microorganisms from a wide range of environments. It has launched numerous scientists into successful careers spanning academia, industry and government. This proposal seeks to take the course in an important new direction to make it better able to provide the type of training needed to utlize microbes to solve important societal problems (food, energy, environment, health) in the 21st century. Technical description. Microbes lie at the heart of some of the most exciting scientific questions and opportunities in science today. They offer tractable systems for quantitative systems biology; the chemistry they catalyze is relevant for a wide-range of important problems (from water splitting to nitrogen fixation to pharmaceutical development); they are vital to the proper functioning of numerous ecosystems (from the human body to the oceans); and lastly, microbes have co-evolved with the Earth for billions of years, and thus any effort to understand the history of life or that of the planet necessitates a careful evaluation of their contributions and potential biosignatures. The Microbial Diversity course at the Marine Biological Laboratory (Woods Hole, MA) provides a unique training experience in which students from diverse backgrounds learn how to cultivate, isolate and critically study microorganisms from a wide range of environments. Students are taught both classical and state-of-the-art techniques that provide them with a foundation for discovery in wide range of disciplines. Our goal is to bring a quantitative and mechanistic focus to the course by exposing students to systems/synthetic biology approaches, statistical methods, and classical bacterial genetics. This new emphasis is particularly timely given the large accumulation of sequence information in the microbiological sciences resulting from technological innovation in sequencing methodologies. For microbial systems to best be applied to the solution of major societal challenges in the 21st century concerning food, energy, environment and health, the next generation of investigators will need training in how to access the rich diversity of solutions that can be found in the microbial world and apply them in a rigorous, predictive fashion.