Investingating the Microbial Community
One of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Foundational Scientific Focus Areas (FSFA) seeks to elucidate the interspecies interactions that lend stability to natural microbial communities and impart robustness under extreme and dynamic environmental conditions. The phototrophic microbial mat community in a highly variable hypersaline system, Hot Lake, serves as a model community to develop the technologies required to interrogate these interactions in a culture-independent manner. Specifically, the Hot Lake project aims to reveal date mechanisms of phototroph-heterotroph and heterotroph-heterotroph energy and element transfer, especially with respect to carbon. This involves the synthesis of genome and metagenome data with expression profiling (transcript, protein) and metabolite tracking (i.e. metabolomics, stable isotope probing). The FSFA is funded through the Genomic Science Program, part of DOE-BER.
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