Microorganisms such as bacteria, viruses and other single cell organisms, are emerging as key engineering components for solving global societal problems, ranging from human health, to energy, to providing clean water to more than one billion people who currently live without it. This is because, during their nearly 4-billion-year history, microbes have "invented" numerous metabolic reactions that have transformed the Earth's environment. To understand these processes, their impacts on the ecosystem, and to harness them for societal benefits requires a multidisciplinary approach. Microbial Diversity is an advanced research training program at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) that augments traditional PhD and postdoctoral training through an intensive 6.5 week, immersive experience that occurs in the peak summer months when prominent scientists across biological disciplines convene at MBL. This research-training program teaches cutting-edge methods and concepts that impact microbial ecology, ecosystem function and animal-associated microbiomes. To accomplish these goals, participants will receive broad research training at the forefront of microbiological sciences, research ethics and scientific outreach to the public. This experience has broad impacts for the following reasons: 1) The transformative nature of the program enhances retention in research and academic positions; 2) Mentoring postdoctoral trainees in curriculum development provides valuable teaching experience; 3) Participants from underrepresented groups in science will contribute towards the diversification of the scientific workforce. Research products that will emerge from the course include publicly-available resources and cultured isolates of bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms. Many students from this research-training program go on to be leaders in research that incorporates microbial biodiversity, and in at the intersection of science and society.
This research-training experience integrates training across biological scales; from understanding one metabolic pathway in a single organism, to dynamics of single cells in a population, to understanding the impact of microbes on the ecosystem scale. The goal of this program is to integrate training from the disciplines of microbiology, ecology, evolution, chemistry, computational science, and bioinformatics in order to shape the future leaders of microbial diversity science. This is accomplished by integrating modeling, experimentation, and function with emerging cellular properties across broad spatio-temporal scales in order to be able to predict the behavior of living cells in natural systems. In the next three years, specific training will be offered in: (i) cultivation that leverages information from the vast, publicly-available sequence databases, with a focus on novel eukaryotes, viruses, and microbial consortia, (ii) isolating and characterizing the role of viruses in microbial diversity, function and ecology; (iii) quantitative tools and modeling of high-resolution changes of metabolic fluxes in time and space. The objectives of this research-training experience are as follows: (i) Participants will receive broad research training in transformative theoretical and applied approaches at the forefront of microbiological sciences, through a combination of classroom, workshop, and laboratory-based didactic activities; (ii) Intensive and ongoing longitudinal explorations of marine, freshwater and host-associated microbial communities will be integrated to identify microbial dynamics over a five-year time series of publicly available data, and (iii) Postdoctoral researchers will receive direct experience in active learning in the classroom and laboratory.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
