Ithaca College

Jeffrey Werner, Cornell University
"Bacterial Community Structure Predicts Function in Full-Scale Bioenergy Systems"

4:00 p.m.
CNS 112 
Department Seminar Series

Refreshments served at 3:40, 1st floor CNS foyer. Bring your mug. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations should contact Nancy Pierce at 274-3161.  We ask that requests for accommodations be made as soon as possible

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Anheuser-Busch breweries make bioenergy from their wastes using bioreactors with complex microbial communities. We analyzed ½ million bacterial 16S rRNA gene sequences from nine of these bioreactors, in a time series of 112 samples. We found that the more functionally specialized bacterial populations were resilient to disturbances over timescales of years! Using computational ecology tools, we showed that the function and the environment of a microbial community were correlated with its phylogenetic structure. In other words, the structure of a community predicts its function. This may help us to engineer microbial communities for new uses.