Abstract:

Hydrothermal vents are vibrant ecosystems with enormous biodiversity, providing unique opportunities for resolving evolutionary mysteries and discovering new functions for biotechnological applications. Through long-term cultivation of barite-rick rocks retrieved from the 3.7 km-deep hydrothermal vent sites located in the Pescadero basin, Mexico, we discovered diverse new lineages of microbes of ecological and evolutionary importance. These lineages include microbial consortia that play a central role in methane sequestration in the deep sea and Asgard archaea that likely share common ancestors with eukaryotes. Laboratory cultivations under varying conditions led to drastic reductions in biodiversity, enabling confident resolution of these archaeal genomes which have been otherwise highly fragmented, incomplete, and contaminated. These genomes led to the discovery of new clades of viruses and new modes of DNA replication that implicate the evolutionary transition from archaea to eukaryotes, as well as nucleic acid-processing enzymes that exhibit unique functions when expressed ectopically. This laboratory cultivation-based framework can facilitate the discovery of new biology in uncharted microbiomes.

Biography:

Fabai Wu received his B.Sc in Biotechnology in Zhejiang University (2008) and obtained his cum laude Ph.D at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience Delft (2015). He received the Kavli Thesis Prize for his Ph.D studies on bacterial spatial organization using nanoengineering and microfluidics, as well as a Rubicon Award and a HFSP fellowship for his postdoctoral studies on global microbial carbon and nitrogen cycles at Caltech.

All Are Welcome!