Opportunity: Systems Biology Enabled Research on the Roles of M

DOE’s Genomic Science program supports fundamental systems biology research to advance understanding of plants, microbes, and multispecies communities in energy and the environment. Exploring the translation of organisms’ genomes into catalytic proteins, regulatory systems, and metabolic pathways can shed new light on the mechanistic basis of biological processes and how these processes change in response to community interactions and shifting environmental variables. By better understanding relationships between systems biology properties of microbes and environmental processes, Genomic Science program research can help bridge biogeochemical cycle understanding from molecular- to ecosystem-scales. The global carbon cycle plays a central role in regulating atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and thus Earth’s climate, but understanding of many key processes driven by microbial communities at the most foundational levels of the carbon cycle remains limited and contributes to uncertainties at higher scale processes. This has been particularly true for terrestrial ecosystems and sedimentary environments, which present formidable experimental challenges due to their compositional heterogeneity and complex microbial communities. Fortunately, increasingly sophisticated approaches for “meta-omics” (i.e. metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, metaproteomics, etc.) coupled to high resolution analytical technologies have offered new tools for the investigation of functional properties of microbial communities. There has also been a rapid acceleration in researchers’ ability to isolate and analyze microbes and consortia from the environment, build genetic tools for their experimental manipulation, and construct predictive models of their metabolic and regulatory processes. These advances have allowed much more sophisticated studies on the roles played by microbial communities as key points of integration between major biogeochemical cycles (e.g. carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, phosph