Omics for understanding microbial functional dynamics

As a discipline, the field of microbial ecology has generally been limited by access to tools that have sufficient depth of resolution to enable exploration of complex microbial communities to determine 'who is there?' and 'what they are doing?'.Until the mid 1980s most of our knowledge was based on the study of cultured microbial isolates or net enzymatic activities measured from laboratory enrichment experiments or environmental samples, without knowledge of the particular members of the community that were contributing to those functions.Since then, microbiologists have added a variety of molecular tools to our toolbox, allowing us to directly assess the identities and functions of microbial communities in a variety of environments without the necessity of prior cultivation.Most of the advances in molecular tools for assessing microbial community function have focused on the sequencing of nucleic acids.Sequencing of genomic or metagenomic DNA provides phylogenetic and functional gene information about specific organisms or communi-E-mail jrjansson@lbl.