Israel Training School (hybrid)

Microbial communities inhabit every niche in nature. They are a great and often unaccounted for modulators of chemical and biochemical processes affecting all levels of biological organization. They are active in the soil and water, or as symbionts of other organisms. They are important providers of ecosystem services, either directly, by e.g. cycling minerals and compounds in specific ways, or indirectly, by e.g. maintaining the health of other organisms, or by controlling their populations. Molecular tools, which are culture independent, allow us to sensitively profile the taxonomic composition of communities, their potential genetic toolkit alongside active metabolic pathways, as individual strains and species or as communities, and most importantly, the interaction of these levels of diversity with environmental factors such as temperature and pressure, pH, humidity and moisture, salinity, the concentration of specific metabolites, etc. Understanding microbial populations or communities with genetic tools can thus inform nature conservation, but also agriculture, industry and even tourism.