Cordero Laboratory: Microbial Communities as Distributed Metabolic Systems

One of the major challenges in biology is to understand how collectives –formed by the aggregation of individuals and species– function and evolve. We address this challenge in the context of microbial communities, which play a central role in the environment, industry and human health. The challenge starts with the development of a systems-level understanding of what communities are: how to describe them in functional and quantitative terms, and how to predict their behavior. Focus is on systems with a strong spatial structure, and in particular on those communities that assemble to decompose complex organic materials in the ocean. This class of systems allows us to study ecology at the micro-scale, establishing the connections between genetics, physiology and multi-cellular phenomena.

At a fundamental level, we are interested in understanding the physiological and ecological constrains of microbial life that lead to the emergence of structure in microbial ecosystem. We address this fundamental problem in the context of the microbial communities that digest complex forms of organic matter in the environment, and in particular, the ocean. This choice of context allows us to establish a link between the micro-scale community dynamics and processes of global impact, such as the C cycle. Moreover, COM-degrading communities have a large potential for applications in industry, especially as tools to unlock new biomass feedstocks.

Research is enabled by a suit of resources built over the last few years: a large and diverse collection of marine bacteria (representative of most well-known particle associated organisms), genetic tools, ecological arenas for synthetic ecologies, mathematical models and hundreds of newly sequenced genomes.