Life on the Rocks: Chronic Subaerial Microbial Biofilms on Stone Monuments

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Microbes, and maybe more correctly, microbial communities, are remarkable for their metabolic diversity, far exceeding that of multicellular organisms. Where there is a source of free energy and essential elements for life, there is likely a microbial community to be found, regardless of any environmental stresses that might be present. Such environmental communities are essential to all geochemical cycles and hence to all life on earth. They are also directly essential to function of multicellular life due to their ability to effectively recycle almost all natural polymers and other products from multicellular organisms. This project will focus on the development of methods for modeling microbial communities within the context of air-exposed stone environments. The goal is to characterize the form and function of such communities and their metabolic activity based on knowledge of their stark physical and chemical environments, and of their metabolic capability through genomic techniques. We will gather data from microbial communities growing on marble surfaces at Arlington National Cemetery and Cimitero Monumentale (Milan, Italy), and incorporate the resulting data into physics-based mathematical models.Subaerial stone surfaces are generally hostile platforms for life with the consequence that any microbial community metabolism is likely relatively simple (as compared, for example, to a gut microbial metabolism), and is likely fairly isolated, as it is difficult for other organisms to survive. On the other hand, this very tenuousness likely means that the community is tightly tuned to its physical environment, so that understanding their interactions with each other and with their environment is necessary for understanding community function. Within the community, consortial associations are probably important for survival. All of these things make them likely candidates for modeling study. The project team will combine 24 hour study of a field site (the Arlington National Cemetery amphitheater) with a physical biofilm model to qualitatively characterize such a system. Detailed modeling and characterization of a chronic, multispecies environmental microbial community, and its interaction with its surroundings, has not been carried out. This is a significant task because of its non-trivial and strongly coupled physical, chemical, and biological aspects. The core of this project is to address these issues in an example natural community. The PI's aim is to combine and integrate comprehensive data gathering into a multiscale model that provides a quantitative characterization of an environmental microbial community.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.