The Bay Paul Center is directed by MBL Senior Scientist Mitchell Sogin. This grant will provide funds to purchase advanced robotics and high- throughput DNA sequencing machines that will enable scientists to study how the genomes of vast communities of microorganisms interact with each other and contribute and respond to environmental change. They were the only forms of life on Earth during the first three billion years of our evolutionary history. In fact, all multicellular organisms, including humans, are completely dependent on diverse species of microbes for their survival.
Microbial life is the glue that binds together the macroscopic world.
Unfortunately, very little is known about the specific organisms that make up the microbial world. Scientists are only able to culture, and therefore study, a small fraction of the billions of species of microbes that inhabit the Earth and its ecosystems. Thanks to the genetic revolution, however, scientists now have the tools to study the genomes that together comprise microbial communities. Microbial ecologists, molecular evolutionists, and genome scientists from the MBL and Woods Hole scientific communities will form a coalition to study these composite genomes and how they influence biogeochemical processes within ecosystems. This novel research initiative will be led by Sogin and his colleagues at the Josephine Bay Paul Center in Comparative Molecular Biology and Evolution, which was established at the MBL in 1996.