Environmental Microbiota Correlation with Material Processing Activities

摘要

Microorganisms are essentially ubiquitous, having evolved immense diversity and inhabited almost every niche on the planet. Microbes react to long- and short-term environmental changes, which are manifested in the microbial community composition, changes in the genetic makeup of the microorganisms comprising the community, and/or other structural and functional variations of the microorganisms. These changes can thus become signatures indicating the physical and chemical conditions, current and past, of the surrounding environment. Recent technological advances in DNA sequencing and bioinformatics have enabled the measurements and interpretation of changes in microbial populations in situ. We are interested in examining the state changes in microbial communities elicited by nuclear materials and chemicals associated with nuclear material processing activities. Metagenomics research, a young and rapidly advancing discipline studying genetic material recovered directly from an environment, has been applied to the studies of many complex biological systems. We intend to apply systematic studies of microbial community manifestation in a canonical environment where background measurements of physical and chemical parameters are available. We will take advantage of the tremendous advancements in massively parallel DNA sequencing techniques, high performance computation, and analytic algorithm development to explore and quantify measureable biosignatures in the microbial community that can be correlated to certain nuclear material processing activities.