New Microbiology: From Molecules to Ecosystems – Tâm Mignot
Metagenomics has profoundly changed our understanding of biodiversity, the evolutionary relationships between organisms, and their extraordinary adaptive capabilities. In particular, the exploration of environments on a global scale has revealed that the vast majority of terrestrial biodiversity is microbial. But this biodiversity remains impossible to quantify precisely: estimates of the number of bacterial species range from a few million to a thousand billion. These figures are all the more staggering because they do not account for the complexity of the interactions that govern the functioning of entire ecosystems.
This “dark matter” of life largely eludes us, as the complexity of natural consortia remains incomparable to that of systems studied in the laboratory. Only a tiny fraction of microorganisms can be cultured, and an even smaller number have genetic tools available to dissect their mechanisms. Our understanding of microbial processes thus relies on a limited and unrepresentative set of model organisms.
The challenge of the new microbiology is therefore to move beyond the dichotomy between describing communities in their natural environments and mechanistic analysis in the laboratory. These lectures will present emerging concepts and approaches that link molecules, cells, interactions, and ecosystems. They will also examine how this integrative microbiology is essential for understanding and addressing current and future ecological, health, and human crises.
