A new evaluation of our life-support system.

Abstract

After more than 150 years of research in microbiology, new technologies and new insights into the microbial world have sparked a revolution in the field. This is a much needed development, not only to renew interest in prokaryote research, but also to meet many emerging challenges in medicine, agriculture and industrial processes. Although many microbiologists—such as Emil von Behring, Robert Koch, Jacques Monod, Francois Jacob, Andre Lwoff, Alexander Fleming, Selman A. Waksman and Joshua Lederberg—grace the list of Nobel laureates, attention moved away from microbiology as biologists focused their interest on eukaryotic cells and higher organisms in the 1970s and 1980s. Furthermore, from the beginning, research on prokaryotes has suffered from an anthropocentric view, regarding as interesting only those organisms that cause disease or that can be exploited for industrial or agricultural use. But the advent of new technologies, some of which have been driven by a need to understand eukaryotes, may change this. We are increasingly realizing how little we know about microbes in general, their diversity, the mechanisms of their evolution and adaptation and their modes of existence within, and communication with, their environment and higher organisms. As bacteria have succeeded in occupying virtually all ecological niches on this planet, ranging from arctic regions to oceanic hot springs, they hold an immense wealth of genetic information that we have barely started to explore and that may provide many useful applications for humans. The new technologies that allow us to sequence and annotate whole genomes more rapidly and to analyse the expression of thousands of genes in a single experiment are likely to speed up this change, particularly as microbes are well suited for high‐throughput analysis. Any microbial genome can now be sequenced within a few hours and, in the near future, new bioinformatics tools will enable scientists not …