Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity, 26129 Oldenburg, Germany; Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany; Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment, University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany; Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, MA, USA; Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, Bremen, Germany.
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA; Earth and Environmental Sciences, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA; Innovative Genomics Institute, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA; Biomedicine Discovery Institute, Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia; Department of Environmental Science Policy, and Management, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA.
Cell. 2024 Sep 19;187(19):5151-5170. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2024.08.028.
Microbes were the only form of life on Earth for most of its history, and they still account for the vast majority of life's diversity. They convert rocks to soil, produce much of the oxygen we breathe, remediate our sewage, and sustain agriculture. Microbes are vital to planetary health as they maintain biogeochemical cycles that produce and consume major greenhouse gases and support large food webs. Modern microbiologists analyze nucleic acids, proteins, and metabolites; leverage sophisticated genetic tools, software, and bioinformatic algorithms; and process and integrate complex and heterogeneous datasets so that microbial systems may be harnessed to address contemporary challenges in health, the environment, and basic science. Here, we consider an inevitably incomplete list of emergent themes in our discipline and highlight those that we recognize as the archetypes of its modern era that aim to address the most pressing problems of the 21st century.
微生物是地球历史上大部分时间里唯一的生命形式，它们仍然占据着生命多样性的绝大多数。它们将岩石转化为土壤，产生我们呼吸的大部分氧气，处理我们的污水，并维持农业。微生物对行星健康至关重要，因为它们维持着生物地球化学循环，产生和消耗主要的温室气体，并支持大型食物网。现代微生物学家分析核酸、蛋白质和代谢物；利用复杂的遗传工具、软件和生物信息学算法；并处理和整合复杂和异构的数据集，以便利用微生物系统来解决健康、环境和基础科学方面的当代挑战。在这里，我们考虑了我们学科中不可避免的不完整主题列表，并强调了那些我们认为是其现代时代原型的主题，旨在解决 21 世纪最紧迫的问题。
