A two-day workshop reviewing the past progress, future opportunities, and possible new approaches to advance the field of Geomicrobiology and Microbial Geochemistry (GMG) will be held in Chicago, IL, involving 30 leading scientists in the field. The primary product of this event will be the generation of a report illustrating these points to serve as an informational tool for the field at large and scientists in other fields with possible overlapping expertise and interest. Additionally, participants will lay out at least one viable framework to better encourage and facilitate the multidisciplinary nature of the challenges and opportunities for basic scientific advancement in the field.
Geomicrobiology and Microbial Geochemistry are two fields of expertise intimately linked towards understanding the fundamental nature of how microorganisms and their chemical surroundings behave in tandem. Microorganisms shape their surroundings through metabolism and growth, dominating many geochemical cycles (including carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, and iron), while the chemical setting (including minerals, water, and gases) plays a decisive role in selecting for populations of microbes able to thrive in specific locations. This link between microorganisms and their chemical surroundings shape a wide variety of modern and ancient settings. There remain a host of questions, challenges, and opportunities for advancing better understanding of these interactions. These gaps in understanding limit the ability to precisely define signals of life in deep time or other planets, gauge the relative changes in microbial cycling of elements in response to climate change, and predict how anthropogenic impacts on land, sea, and atmosphere will affect natural systems, among other things.
Microbial interactions with their chemical surroundings are key processes to consider in a wide range of problems of great societal interest, including the availability of resources, the impact of man on natural systems, the fate of contaminants in the environment, and the origin, evolution, and evidence for life. Opportunities for the development of new technologies and the discovery of new chemical compounds utilized by microorganisms for specific functions have been, and will continue to be realized by encouraging research in these fields. Additionally, there are a number of critical tools and areas of expertise that are inherently valuable in working with microorganisms and their surroundings. Finding new and improved ways of bringing these multidisciplinary areas together represent another significant opportunity for advancing science and for training a new generation of scientists able to effectively work across these boundaries.
This award supported the convening of a workshop to cover the achievements, infrastructure necessary to have supported those achievements, and the most promising and relevant future possible directions of research in the field of Geomicrobiology and Microbial Geochemistry (GMG). Co-convenors and PIs Druschel and Dick gathered information prior to the meeting and organized a two and a half day meeting of 28 researchers from around the US to build concensus opinion from a representative pool of researchers in the field. The meeting, held in October, 2103 in Chicago, IL, was an intense round of discussions and exercises to build this concensus on a number of key issues that were discussed in order to identify optimal ways forward for GMG research and training. Significant progress towards unraveling the key links between microbial life and the geosphere has been made, in many cases fueled by the advent of advanced genetics techniques for identifying and characterizing microorganisms and by advances in describing key geochemical parameters in field and lab experiments from molecular to global scales. This progress in the fundamental science of GMG is key to societally relevant issues such as the impact of humans on earth systems, the responsible use and development of energy and natural resources, the impact of climate change on earth and ecosystem processes, and efforts to understand the evolution of life on earth and search for life on other planets. Key infrastructure in the continued scientific advancement of this field include continued funding for large scale facilities to support genomic sequencing, geochemical analyses at increasing powerful spatial/temporal resolution, and the computational infrastructure to archive, analyze, and disseminate the massive datasets now being produced. A number of exciting emerging approaches were identified as potentially key to develop for future breakthroughs, including: development of educational pipelines and computer resources that are essential to realize the promise of omics approaches (including genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics) for GMG, coupling these omics approaches with classical microbial and geochemical approaches to understand ‘microbial dark matter’, the massive taxonomic and genetic biodiversity known to exist but whose functions remain undefined, utilizing next generation in situ sensors, analytical capabilities, and emerging methods for imaging single cells and materials at the nano- to micro- scales towards developing a more detailed molecular understanding of important processes, pursuing a recent paradigm shift to recognize ‘cryptic cycles’ in earth and environmental processes where biotic and abiotic coupling is controlled via short lived, highly reactive intermediates, development of new computational approaches to bring together microbial and geochemical data in new ways and unravel the complexity of natural processes. These naturally lead to a series of envisioned grand challenges where these approaches may be applied to achieve the greatest advancements: Opportunity to couple microbiological and geochemical information to uncover specific interactions between microorganisms and their chemical environment. Opportunity to fully merge the genomic and geologic records to link the evolution of life with the evolution of earth’s oceans, atmosphere, and land. Opportunity to consider the temporal and spatial scales important to define the links between microorganisms and their geochemical surroundings and understand the role specific molecular interactions may play in local and even global processes. Specific recommendations to realize these opportunities include calls to maintain and improve large- scale facilities used to gather genetic and geochemical information alongside a robust computational infrastructure to maximize use of these data, and development of a research structure that encourages training and research with teams bringing together the biological, chemical, and geological expertise and tools necessary to advance understanding of GMG questions. Specific outcomes from this workshop include completion of a 37 page report detailing the workshop results. Additionally, the workshop spawned an effort to put together a thematic issue of the journal Elements, detailing the ideas and directions GMG research is headed and it's potential impact on a wide array of fields and ideas. This issue is currently under review and will be published in Deecember 2015, and sould provide another avenue to broadly disseminate what we have learned and the exciting possible future directions for the field as it contributes to a range of societally relevant issues.
