Year
2017
Abstract
Microorganisms are essentially ubiquitous, having evolved immense diversity to inhabit almost every niche on the planet. Microbes react to long- and short-term environmental changes, which are manifested as changes in the composition of the microbial community and/or changes in the genetic makeup of the microorganisms that comprise the community. These changes can thus become signatures indicating the physical and chemical conditions, current and past, of the surrounding environment. Recent technological advances in DNA sequencing and bioinformatics have enabled the measurements and interpretation of changes in microbial populations in situ. Only recently have these measurements become feasible. We are interested in examining the state changes in microbial communities elicited by nuclear materials and chemicals associated with nuclear material processing activities. Metagenomics research, a young and rapidly advancing discipline studying genetic material recovered directly from an environmental community, has been applied to the studies of many complex biological systems. We intend to apply systematic studies of microbial community manifestation in a canonical environment where background measurements of physical and chemical parameters are available. We will take advantage of the tremendous advancements in massively parallel DNA sequencing techniques, high performance computation, and analytic algorithm development to explore and quantify measureable biosignatures in the microbial community that can be correlated to certain nuclear material processing facility processes.