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Podcast: UC Science Today
Episode:

A national effort to harness the planet's microbial ecosystems
Category: Science & Medicine
Duration: 00:01:04
Publish Date: 2015-12-01 18:00:00
Description: Despite being Earth’s most abundant and diverse form of life, we still know very little about microbes. Now, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is leading a new national research effort called the Unified Microbiome Initiative, which is aimed at understanding and harnessing the planet’s microbial ecosystems. Postdoctoral scholar Amor Menezes has been studying how microbes can aid future space missions by producing food, fuels, and pharmaceuticals from limited resources. "You can think of them as bacteria, so they’re really small organisms. They’re singled-celled. And we have them essentially all around us. And so these microbes will take kind of these available resources, and they will produce this chemical of interest, and then the idea is that either we leverage this chemical of interest to produce other things, again using microbes, or maybe that chemical is interesting in and of itself. Maybe it’s food, maybe it’s fuel because we can combine with something else." Menezes says this can lead to innovations in agriculture, energy, health, and the environment. Photo caption: A colorized microscopy image hints at the complexity of microbial life. It shows two bacterial cells in soil. The bacteria glue clay particles together and protect themselves from predators. This also stabilizes soil and stores carbon that could otherwise enter the atmosphere. (Credit: Manfred Auer, Berkeley Lab)
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