title: Toward a Predictive Understanding of Earth's Microbiomes to Address 21st Century Challenges.
abstract: Microorganisms have shaped our planet and its inhabitants for over 3.5 billion years. Humankind has had a profound influence on the biosphere, manifested as global climate and land use changes, and extensive urbanization in response to a growing population. The challenges we face to supply food, energy, and clean water while maintaining and improving the health of our population and ecosystems are significant. Given the extensive influence of microorganisms across our biosphere, we propose that a coordinated, cross-disciplinary effort is required to understand, predict, and harness microbiome function. From the parallelization of gene function testing to precision manipulation of genes, communities, and model ecosystems and development of novel analytical and simulation approaches, we outline strategies to move microbiome research into an era of causality. These efforts will improve prediction of ecosystem response and enable the development of new, responsible, microbiome-based solutions to significant challenges of our time.
authors.affiliation: Departments of Microbiology and Medicine, New York University School of Medicine, New York, New York, USA.
authors.forename: Martin J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Blaser
authors.affiliation: The Ecosystems Center, Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, USA.
authors.forename: Zoe G
authors.initials: ZG
authors.lastname: Cardon
authors.affiliation: Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA.
authors.forename: Mildred K
authors.initials: MK
authors.lastname: Cho
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA.
authors.forename: Jeffrey L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Dangl
authors.affiliation: Department of Bacteriology, Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center and Wisconsin Energy Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, USA.
authors.forename: Timothy J
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-8738-2467
authors.initials: TJ
authors.lastname: Donohue
authors.affiliation: Biology and the Built Environment Center, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, USA Department of Biology, Institute of Ecology and Evolution, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, USA.
authors.forename: Jessica L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Green
authors.affiliation: Departments of Pediatrics and Computer Science & Engineering, and Center for Microbiome Innovation, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA.
authors.forename: Rob
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Knight
authors.affiliation: Biosciences, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, USA.
authors.forename: Mary E
authors.initials: ME
authors.lastname: Maxon
authors.affiliation: Biosciences, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, USA.
authors.forename: Trent R
authors.initials: TR
authors.lastname: Northen
authors.affiliation: Division of Biostatistics, Gladstone Institutes and Institute for Human Genetics, Institute for Computational Health Science, University of California, San Francisco, California, USA.
authors.forename: Katherine S
authors.initials: KS
authors.lastname: Pollard
authors.affiliation: Earth and Environmental Sciences, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Berkeley, California, USA Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, University of California, Berkeley, California, USA ELBrodie@lbl.gov.
authors.forename: Eoin L
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-8453-8435
authors.initials: EL
authors.lastname: Brodie
mesh_terms: D018534:Earth, Planet; D017753:Ecosystem; D005544:Forecasting; D006801:Humans; D064307:Microbiota; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D012106:Research; D014867:Water
chemical_list: D014867:Water