Quantitative and Genetic Approaches to Microbial Diversity

在海洋生物实验室（伍兹霍尔，MA）的微生物多样性课程提供了一个独特的培训经验，来自不同背景的学生学习如何培养，分离和批判性地研究微生物从广泛的环境。 它使许多科学家在学术界、工业界和政府部门取得了成功。该提案旨在将课程推向一个重要的新方向，使其能够更好地提供利用微生物解决21世纪重要社会问题（食品，能源，环境，健康）所需的培训类型。 技术说明。 微生物是当今科学中一些最令人兴奋的科学问题和机会的核心。 它们为定量系统生物学提供了易于处理的系统;它们催化的化学反应与广泛的重要问题有关（从水分解到固氮再到药物开发）;它们对许多生态系统的正常运作至关重要（从人体到海洋）;最后，微生物与地球共同进化了数十亿年，因此，任何试图了解生命或地球历史的努力都需要仔细评估它们的贡献和潜在的生物特征。 在海洋生物实验室（伍兹霍尔，MA）的微生物多样性课程提供了一个独特的培训经验，来自不同背景的学生学习如何培养，分离和批判性地研究微生物从广泛的环境。 学生被教导古典和国家的最先进的技术，为他们提供了一个基础，发现在广泛的学科。我们的目标是通过让学生接触系统/合成生物学方法，统计方法和经典细菌遗传学，为课程带来定量和机械的重点。由于测序方法学的技术创新，微生物科学中积累了大量的序列信息，这一新的重点特别及时。 为了使微生物系统最好地应用于解决21世纪有关食品，能源，环境和健康的重大社会挑战，下一代研究人员将需要培训如何获得微生物世界中可以找到的丰富多样的解决方案，并以严格的预测方式应用它们。

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.