M₂C₂ webinar: #5 The IAMM project – Sher, Grossart, Segré, Voss labs

Marine biogeochemistry, energy and greenhouse gas fluxes from the ocean are primarily controlled by microbes. Looking at marine communities in a holistic way, the IAMM team (Interactions Among Marine Microbes) aims to predict how marine microorganisms growing together interact and affect each other, based on the information encoded in their genomes. Our work is motivated by increasing evidence that interactions between marine microorganisms are key to understanding global biogeochemical cycles, weather and climate. Understanding the fate of these interactions is nevertheless extremely complicated due to the enormous diversity of microorganisms and the richness of their metabolism. We are working to tackle this challenge through a tightly integrated combination of genome analyses, genome-scale modeling, and laboratory experiments, to identify genomic traits dictating how environmentally-relevant microbes interact. In the M₂C₂ presentations, we will ask three questions: 1) How are traits related to microbial interactions partitioned across marine microbial diversity? 2) To what extent does the growth of marine microbes under lab conditions recapitulate their metabolic potential? 3) To what extent does the phenotype of microbial interactions vary between ecologically-divergent strains of two model marine microbes (Prochlorococcus and Alteromonas)?