We now have very powerful tools that allow us to answer complicated ecological questions that we could not answer before. What is the ultimate goal for microbial ecology studies? How can people benefit from microbial ecology?
Ultimate goal: map all of the life on earth; from the bottom of the oceans to the upper atmosphere.
I am sure it would be quite difficult to get funding but it is what pure science is all about. The more data we can use in our models, the more accurate they can become.
New discoveries can (and have) lead to new technologies that benefit humans.
Think of our understanding of gut microflora and the renewed interest in probiotic foods. Or the possibility of using diatoms or algae with synthetic genomes to synthesize silicon or carbonate nano-materials using only sunlight, CO2, and Si/CO3.
One simple question comes to mind: why so much diversity? There are a huge number of phyotypes found by almost every study, are there really that many different ecological niches to fill?
Novel small molecule discovery seems like a natural extension of metagenomics, although I see relatively few papers leveraging this right now, probably since predicting protein structure/function from primary DNA seq data is still non-trivial.
Although here's an interesting example of just that, which came out today:
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/33/E3129.full
Everywhere across the universe and disciplines! Development and refinement of tools for minitoring and restioration of environment, at any levels, bioremediation, renewable energy and refinement of models of different functional groups, symbiosis, disease agents- environment -disease interaction and climate change. Surely a challenge and pivotal endeavor for microbial ecologists an and another leap for mankind..
Buenaflor, all you mentioned is a beautiful picture, but when we come to details, I always ask myself those questions. For environment monitoring, how could microbiological analysis monitor the health of an ecosystem? Are there any microbial indicators or a certain structure of microbial communities that help tell the wellness of an ecosystem? For ecosystem restoration, although we see many achievements about using engineered microbes or microbial consortia to clean up pollutions, such as oil spill, heavy metals or other contaminations.
Ultimate goal of all ecological studies is to protect Mother Earth and prevent pollution of all types !
I usually do diversity of functional groups in monitoring the status of the ecosystem using culture systems which is froth with the challenge of culturing (only ca. 1% of population in marine ocean). For non culturable, I use biofilm consortia and direct counting which is very tedious and time bound. If I have direct access to the pool of environmental genome, my work will be simpler and more intersting because i now can dispense with the isolation and culture process (which ironically took up the main volume of the work) and concentrate on the application which is what we need right now! Metagenomics offers me possibility of exploring vast diversity of degradation pathways of environmental genome (antibiotic and metal resistance genes in a population and other functional groups). These does not even cover biotechnology and synthetic biology.
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