Research Seminar - Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment

Seminar abstract: Twenty-first century microbiology faces several grand challenges. First, microbial diversity is extremely high with most (>99%) as-yet uncultured. Characterizing such vast diversity and understanding the mechanisms shaping it presents numerous obstacles. Second, although microorganisms control, at least to some degree, various ecosystem processes, establishing the linkage between ecosystem function and microbial community structure is even more difficult. Third, human activities are causing multiple types of global environmental changes, including elevated atmospheric CO2 concentration (eCO2), climate warming, increased nitrogen (N) deposition, land use change, and as a potential consequence of each of these, biodiversity loss. It is critical to understand the responses, adaptations and feedback mechanisms of biological communities to climate warming. In addition, scaling the information from molecules to populations, to communities, and to ecosystems for understanding ecosystem behaviors and dynamics is a formidable task. With omics technologies, microbiologists have begun to tackle some of these challenges.

In this talk, representative examples of omics and metagenomics studies relevant to biogeochemistry and global changes will be highlighted. I will first compare the differences and performances of various types of metagenomic technologies in analyzing microbial community structure, followed by description of using metagenomic technologies to address theoretical ecological questions related to species-area relationships, and metabolic theory of ecology.

I will also describe the most recent advance in GeoChip development, and examples on how to use high throughput metagenomics technologies to address biological questions such as microbially mediated feedback mechanisms in response to climate warming in a grassland ecosystem.

Furthermore, I will describe the importance of stochastic processes in controlling microbial community diversity, and a novel random matrix theory-based framework for discerning the network interactions in microbial communities. Finally I will briefly discuss future perspectives on linking genomics to ecosystem functions by scaling information across different levels of biological organizations.

The seminar will be followed by drinks and nibbles available in the foyer of L9. No RSVP is required, we hope to see you there.