New approaches to resolving community metaproteomes: ComProt

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Understanding interactions between organisms in an ecosystem is a critical part of ecological research and facilitates our understanding of how ecosystems function and this is particularly important for microorganisms and microarthropods as they are often difficult to study in situ in real time. Currently the natural environment faces many challenges and we need to be able to measure the impacts of changes in climate, pollutant levels, intensive farming and development of ley systems to understand how resilient communities are and how Carbon, nitrogen and phosphorous cycles are affected.Microrganisms play a vital role in our environment they occupy a wide range of habitats from our gut and body surfaces all the way to hot vents under the sea, they are critical in the soil for recycling of nutrients and plant health and responsible for the essential digestion of cellulose from grass being broken down in the specialised stomach of the cow termed the rumen to the global cycling of carbon in the oceans via harvesting of sunlight as many bacteria can photosynthesize and thus harvest light energy to fix carbon dioxide. A major problem exists in our ability to study the physiology and overall activities of these microbes due to the fact that we cannot isolate and cultivate (yet) the vast majority (probably over 98%) of them in the laboratory. We know they exist because we have used methods similar to DNA forensic approaches to detect them solely based on their DNA using signature genes which allow us to identify and group them. Most of this diversity is bacterial but there are also several groups of fungi. New methods are being developed for the study of these microbial populations and this is called metagenomics and we are focused in this projects on the proteins produced termed metaproteomic. Proteins equate with activity as all enzymes are proteins and act as catalysts for reactions. Therefore, we can use the metagenomes to help in identifying which proteins are present because there is a relationship between the DAN code and the sequence of peptides in a protein. Making this link is challenging so we aim to improve the understanding of how to translate a series of peptide sequences into functioning proteins and recognise both their origins and putative function.so that we study the microbial community as a population of many genomes rather than trying to isolate and study one. We can study this population in our guts or in the soil by extracting and analysing DNA for diversity analysis, RNA for gene expression and protein for confirmation of activities and metabolites to determine physiology. In addition we can extract DNA and express it in other bacteria which are culturable. This allows us to capture the DNA and express it thus gaining an insight into some functions such as specific enzymes or pigments with special properties. The imof the proposed work is to establish a network of academic partners to build capacity in this important area of science to ensure that we are able to study and exploit all the interesting and exciting attributes of bacterial populations and harness them for a sustainable future.