Integrated Omics in Systems Biology: The New Frontier for Environmental Biotechnology

Conference · Tue Aug 12 04:00:00 EDT 2008

OSTI ID:937572

Hazen, Terry C

Environmental biotechnology encompasses a wide range of characterization, monitoring and control for bioenergy and bioremediation technologies that are based on biological processes. Recent breakthroughs in our understanding of biogeochemical processes and genomics are leading to exciting new and cost effective ways to monitor and manipulate the environment and potentially produce bioenergy fuels as we also cleanup the environment. Indeed, our ability to sequence an entire microbial genome in just a few hours is leading to similar breakthroughs in characterizing proteomes, metabolomes, phenotypes, and fluxes for organisms, populations, and communities. Understanding and modeling functional microbial community structure and stress responses in subsurface environments has tremendous implications for our fundamental understanding of biogeochemistry and the potential for making biofuel breakthroughs. Monitoring techniques that inventory and monitor terminal electron acceptors and electron donors, enzyme probes that measure functional activity in the environment, functional genomic microarrays, phylogenetic microarrays, metabolomics, proteomics, and quantitative PCR are also being rapidly adapted for studies in environmental biotechnology. Integration of all of these new high throughput techniques using the latest advances in bioinformatics and modeling will enable break-through science in environmental biotechnology. A review of these techniques with examples from field studies and lab simulations will be discussed.

• Research Organization: Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA (US)
• Sponsoring Organization: Earth Sciences Division; Physical Biosciences Division
• DOE Contract Number: AC02-05CH11231
• OSTI ID: 937572
• Report Number(s): LBNL-941E
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

09 BIOMASS FUELS
54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
BINDING ENERGY
BIOFUELS
BIOGEOCHEMISTRY
BIOLOGY
BIOREMEDIATION
BIOTECHNOLOGY
Biogeochemistry
Biomass Production
Bioremediation
COMMUNITIES
Comparative Genomics
ELECTRONS
ENZYMES
Environmental Genomics
Extremophiles
FUNCTIONALS
Field Studies
Functional Genomics
MONITORING
MONITORS
PROBES
SIMULATION
Sequencing
Stress Response
Sulfate Reducers
Synthetic Biology
Transcriptomics
VALENCE