An award is made to Montana State University to develop a stimulated Raman scattering activated cell sorter to reveal the biology of yet uncharacterized cells in environmental microbiomes. The instrument will be built and utilized by a team of three graduate students working at the intersection of physical chemistry, mechanical engineering, and microbiology. In addition, six undergraduate students will be trained throughout the project. The highly interdisciplinary nature of the project will guarantee a unique training experience for all students. Given the intense interest associated with the microbiome and its effects on ecosystem functioning and human health, a better understanding of the microbial world is needed. This project will train primary and secondary educators to help communicate standards and new findings in this rapidly evolving field. Project activities will target students at Bozeman’s Sacagawea Middle School, the annual “Montana State University Family Science Day†as well as the “Science-Technology Summitâ€, a 3-day annual workshop targeted at K-12 teachers from across the state of Montana.
The resistance to cultivation under laboratory conditions of most microorganisms has hindered our understanding of the functioning of microbes in their natural habitats. A powerful way to study microbes is to characterize their biology under natural conditions at single-cell resolution and link their in situ phenotype - their function in their natural habitat - and genotype - their genetic make-up. While promising, the available instrumentation capable of achieving such phenotype-based cell characterization is notoriously low throughout, destructive to the cell, or both. This project will overcome these bottlenecks by combining stimulated Raman spectroscopy-based cell characterization, microfluidics-based cell sorting, and downstream genetic characterization of sorted cells. The high cell sorting rates achievable by such a system will enable phenotype-based cell sorting of entire microbial communities, something that is currently not achievable using existing technologies. The project will impact researchers across many fields, including microbial ecologists working on natural or human-made system, biogeochemists, and scientists interested in studying single-cell physiology or the physiology of rare cell types.
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.
