Microbiomes Across Environments

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course provides a comprehensive introduction to the theory and techniques of microbiome science, an emerging field that bridges disciplines, merging microbiology with genomics, ecology, population and evolutionary biology, phylogenetics, ecosystem science, and biogeochemistry, and has broad applications in medicine, agriculture, and ecosystem health. Through a combination of faculty and guest lectures and student-led discussion of primary literature we will explore the vast biochemical and metabolic diversity of the microbial world and its relationships with multicellular life. The major component of the course is an independent research project investigating the microbiomes of marine organisms collected by the students or resident in the MBL's Marine Resources Center, or of a salt marsh ecosystem in Woods Hole. Students develop their own hypotheses and sampling strategies, carry our sampling, extract DNA, and perform PCR for sequencing. The last third of the course is devoted to data analysis, where students learn to use the Unix-based bioinformatic tools necessary to find patterns in the hundreds of thousands of DNA sequences their project produced, a skill broadly applicable to any discipline in modern biology.