Periodic Reporting for period 3 - EvolPhysiol (Evolution of Physiology: The link between Earth and Life)
Reporting period: 2022-02-01 to 2023-07-31
The goal of this project is to better understand how microbes harness energy from their environment, how they learned to use new ones, and how this process unfolded during microbial evolution. This will involve large-scale comparative phylogenetic analysis of genes involved in, and genomically associated with, energy-harnessing systems combined with experimental data, using as evolutionary constraints geochemical records of available environmental energy sources.
energy-harnessing traits; iii) and of pathways associated with them; iv) the identification and evolution of the finite
modules in biology; and v) the establishment of an order of events within microbial physiological evolution leading to a fuller understanding of life’s history.
Independent of the final outcome, the results from this project will strengthen the ties between geochemistry and microbiology, and hence stimulate the dialogue across disciplines to further our understanding of Life – a subject that attracts the interest from both researchers and the society in general.