Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
© The Author(s), 2016. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in mBio 7 (2016): e00714-16, doi:10.1128/mBio.00714-16.
Description:
Microorganisms have shaped our planet and its inhabitants for over 3.5 billion years. Humankind has had a profound influence on the biosphere, manifested as global climate and land use changes, and extensive urbanization in response to a growing population. The challenges we face to supply food, energy, and clean water while maintaining and improving the health of our population and ecosystems are significant. Given the extensive influence of microorganisms across our biosphere, we propose that a coordinated, cross-disciplinary effort is required to understand, predict, and harness microbiome function. From the parallelization of gene function testing to precision manipulation of genes, communities, and model ecosystems and development of novel analytical and simulation approaches, we outline strategies to move microbiome research into an era of causality. These efforts will improve prediction of ecosystem response and enable the development of new, responsible, microbiome-based solutions to significant challenges of our time.
Description:
E.L.B. is supported by the Genomes-to-Watersheds Subsurface Biogeochemical
Research Scientific Focus Area, and T.R.N. is supported by
ENIGMA-Ecosystems and Networks Integrated with Genes and Molecular
Assemblies (http://enigma.lbl.gov) Scientific Focus Area, funded by
the U.S. Department of Energy (US DOE), Office of Science, Office of
Biological and Environmental Research under contract no. DE-AC02-
05CH11231 to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). M.E.M.
is also supported by the US DOE, Office of Science, Office of Biological
and Environmental Research under contract no. DE-AC02-05CH11231.
Z.G.C. is supported by National Science Foundation Integrative Organismal
Systems grant #1355085, and by US DOE, Office of Biological and
Environmental Research grant # DE-SC0008182 ER65389 from the Terrestrial
Ecosystem Science Program. M.J.B. is supported by R01 DK
090989 from the NIH. T.J.D. is supported by the US DOE Office of Science’s
Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, grant DE-FC02-
07ER64494. J.L.G. is supported by Alfred P. Sloan Foundation G 2-15-14023. R.K. is supported by grants from the NSF (DBI-1565057) and
NIH (U01AI24316, U19AI113048, P01DK078669, 1U54DE023789,
U01HG006537). K.S.P. is supported by grants from the NSF DMS-
1069303 and the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation (#3300).
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
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