Topic
Impact of Microorganisms
Framing Question
Why have the effects and potential benefits of microbial life not been fully explored?
Learning Objectives
- Explain the great plate anomaly/viable but nonculturable state.
- Give an example of a process/product that was recently attributed to being carried out by microbes.
- Discuss the beneficial impact of microbes to at least two different environments.
- Predict how the removal of microbes can negatively affect a given system.
- Explain how an uncultured organism’s evolutionary relationship to other organisms on a 16S rRNA phylogenetic tree may be established.
- Describe how you would go about prospecting for antibiotics in a new environment.
