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

pi计划利用大规模浓缩和系列制备分馏技术，将复杂的微生物组合分离成其组成种群。目标是实现高度富集，甚至纯度，具有足够的生物量产量，以便在没有培养的情况下对单个微生物种群进行形态学，生化和基因组分析。这项工作将导致开发更有效地挖掘复杂微生物群落中微生物多样性的方法，其中许多组成种群不易培养。如果成功，这项工作将使同时分析基因组、蛋白质组和生物化学成为可能，即使是未培养的微生物。在没有培养的情况下，成功地纯化选定种群的大量生物量，也将允许分析自然同位素比率，从而为这些种群的就地代谢过程提供线索。

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.