Patterns and Processes of Microbial Diversification

Natural communities of microbes are highly diverse, containing an incredible variety of genotypes and species. Despite the important functional roles of microbial diversity in the environment and in association with eukaryotic hosts, microbiologists struggle to provide a convincing mechanistic account for how diversity evolves and is maintained. Explanations have generally been sought from either end of a spectrum of complexity. At one extreme, ‘top-down’ approaches seek to describe the full taxonomic and functional diversity of microbial communities in nature while, at the other extreme, ‘bottom-up’ approaches use evolution experiments to track the origins and fate of diversity in highly simplified, defined laboratory environments. The middle ground remains under-explored, so that we cannot be certain that the mechanisms governing the origins and maintenance of diversity in test tubes are sufficient to explain the patterns of variation observed in natural communities. Our conference will address this knowledge gap directly by bringing together leading researchers working at the interface of the ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approaches to provide a more complete understanding of microbial diversity. We will recruit speakers who capitalize on technological advances in fields from chemistry to data science to investigate the mechanisms that drive microbial dynamics, at every scale, from the molecules microbes use to interact with other microbes and with their eukaryotic hosts to the communities microbes form that affect the health of their host or environment.