Topography of Microbial Assemblages

微生物无处不在，它们是至关重要的。它们是地球上最早的生命形式，已经存在了37亿年；事实上，在最初的20亿年里，细菌是地球上唯一的生物。它们的活动改变了地球，改变了环境，使其他生命形式得以发展。今天，细菌仍然对全球生态系统的健康非常重要，因为它们参与并控制着所有的生物地球化学循环。对于这样一个重要的群体，我们对细菌和古生菌（另一种重要的原核微生物）所知甚少，这也许令人惊讶。部分原因是它们很难研究，尤其是在自然环境中。在实验室培养细菌的传统方法不起作用，因为99%以上的细菌不能在标准微生物培养基中生长。但近年来，在识别自然环境中的微生物多样性方面取得了相当大的进展。遗传学和宏基因组学方法使我们对存在哪些生物体以及这些生物体的功能有了更深入的了解。然而，这些技术是在社区层面上运作的，我们对组成社区的个人，特别是他们如何相互作用，仍然几乎一无所知。这一提议解决了两个问题，即人们对自然环境中的细菌的理解有限，即如何以一种确定的方式操纵这些小生物，以及如何识别不同的“物种”。利用最先进的技术，我们将从自然组合（海洋和土壤环境）中封装细菌，以便对它们进行操作。我们将使用一种新型显微镜来区分不同的细菌种类。结合使用这两种技术，我们将研究不同的细菌物种是如何相互作用的，要么是通过相互提供营养，要么是通过细胞间信号传导控制整个种群的活动。

Microorganisms are everywhere and they are fundamentally important. They were the earliest form of life on the planet and have been around for 3.7 billion years; indeed for the first 2 billion years, bacteria were the only living things on the planet. Their activity changed the planet, changing the environment to allow other life forms to develop. Today, bacteria continue to be very important for the health of the global ecosystem since they are involved in and control all biogeochemical cycles. For such an important group, it is perhaps surprising how little we know about bacteria and archaea (another group of important prokaryotic microbes). This is partly because they are difficult to study, particularly in the natural environment. Classical approaches that involve growing bacteria in the laboratory do not work because more than 99% of bacteria cannot grow in standard microbiological media. But in recent years, considerable progress has been made in identifying the diversity of microbes in the natural environment. Genetic and metagenomic approaches have given us great insight into which organisms are present and, increasingly, the function of these organisms. However, these techniques operate at the level of the community and we still know almost nothing about the individuals that make up that community / and particularly how they interact. This proposal tackles two problems that have limited understanding of bacteria from the natural environment / how to manipulate such small organisms in a defined way and how to identify different 'species'. Using state-of-the-art technology, we will encapsulate bacteria from natural assemblages (both marine and soil environments) so that they can be manipulated. We will use a novel microscope to distinguish between different bacterial species. Using a combination of these two techniques, we will investigate how different bacterial species interact, either through supplying nutrients to each other or controlling the activity of the whole population through cell-to-cell signalling.