Is there more biochemistry to be discovered in the microbial world? How universal is biochemistry between distantly related bacteria? A massive amount of microbial genome data exists, yet every new sequence finds genes for which we cannot predict a concrete function. This proposal seeks to combine genomic information with direct detection of metabolites to answer these questions and provide a path for assigning gene functions in two distantly related microbial groups that play key roles in carbon and sulfur cycling in multiple ecosystems across the planet.
Proposer: Thomas Hanson, University of Delaware
Proposal: Groundtruthing and expanding our metabolic understanding of important C and S cycling microbes