Current Opinions

By Trina McMahon

Microbes rule! Freshwater microbes are my favorite type... often neglected in favor of the more glamorous marine or soil microbes, these critters are responsible for linking terrestrial and aquatic habitats. Given the importance of our freshwater resources for maintaining healthy human populations (and ecosystems!), they deserve equal attention and respect! The following content is a work in continual progress. Comments and suggestions are welcome! Enjoy!

by Larry Smarr

A new frontier field which studies the metagenomics of microbial ecologies is emerging at the interface of genomics, environmental sciences, and information technology. This new field examines the interplay of hundreds to thousands of microbial species present at a specific environmental location in space and time. Each individual organism's genome sequence is now studied as a tightly coupled part of an entire biological community. This means that each individual sequence can now be considered from the worldview of the ecological sciences: the composition of the rest of the community, the environmental conditions in which it is found, and its relationships with other species with which it is found at other times and places. It also sets the stage for many new breakthroughs to occur in basic science, medicine, alternate energy sources, and environmental cleanup.

In this paper I will describe a large-scale, multi-year effort to organize and make publicly available a vast amount of data describing a wide variety of marine microbial ecologies, their genomic content, and the local environments in which they live.