The Lamont Earth Science Colloquium presents:
Breaking open the microbial black-box to improve our understanding of biogeochemical cycling
with Dr. Naomi Levine, Gabilan Distinguished Professorship in Science and Engineering and Professor of Biological Sciences, Quantitative and Computational Biology and Earth Sciences, USC Dornsife.
Marine microbes are the engines that drive biogeochemical cycling in the oceans thus playing a critical role in the climate. Specifically, both the production and the consumption rates of organic carbon are set by the interaction between diverse microbial communities and the chemical and physical environments in which they reside. Modeling these dynamics requires reducing the complexity of microbial communities and linking directly with biogeochemical functions. Microbial metabolic functional guilds provide one approach for reducing microbial complexity and incorporating microbial biogeochemical functions into models. However, defining these guilds can be challenging especially for heterotrophic microbes. We have been using a range of cellular-scale models to both assist in defining metabolic functional guilds from annotated genomes and to help understand the mechanistic basis behind trait trade-offs. These models can relate directly to 'omic measurements for validation and hypothesis generation. They also provide a means for coarse-graining microbial dynamics for incorporation into larger-scale biogeochemical models. The use of pipelines that leverage multiple modeling approaches provides a path forward for bridging from the cellular to ecosystem scale and thus provide new insight into the role that microbial communities play in setting rates of carbon cycling.
Host: Dr. Galen McKinley, Professor, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences (DEES).
The Earth Science Colloquium Series, sponsored by Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Columbia University Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences (DEES), provides a lively forum for discussing a wide variety of topics within the Earth sciences and related fields. Colloquia are attended by the full range of scientific and technical staff at LDEO. Colloquium attendance is required of all pre-orals DEES graduate students.
