Geology Club Seminar

Total community approaches (omics) provide a blueprint of the microbial functions and community diversity within an environment. With genome-resolved metagenomics, this view can be refined, identifying an organism's specific contributions to pathways and processes as well as their interactions with other community members. This approach has led to a recent explosion of genome sequences for uncultured and uncharacterized microbial lineages, many with previously-unknown roles in biogeochemical cycles. My work explores the environmental importance of these novel organisms and the emerging view of the Tree of Life that stems from our new understanding of microbial diversity.