A $7-million donation from the Tula Foundation will support basic science research at the University of British Columbia, including funding up to 40 post-doctoral fellows over the next decade to study the most abundant life forms on Earth.
Microbes are essential contributors to the biosphere — generating air, creating soil, filtering water, degrading toxic chemicals and recycling thousands of tonnes of nutrients every day. Yet scientists know little about the overwhelming majority of these organisms — their origins and how they interact. The study of these microbes will shed light on the general mechanisms underlying life and its evolution.
The investment from the Tula Foundation will establish the Centre for Microbial Diversity and Evolution (CMDE) at UBC, a virtual hub of interdisciplinary research, and fund the pursuit of scientific knowledge including the recruitment, training, and retention of post-doctoral fellows over the next decade.
“Rigorous, fundamental research into microbial diversity is instrumental in helping us answer some of the toughest but most basic questions in biology,” says UBC President Stephen J. Toope. “The investment from the Tula Foundation in this new and emerging area will create new knowledge and maintain Canada’s international leadership in research on microbial diversity and evolution.”
“This is an enormous boost to the cultivation of future generations of researchers focused on understanding microbial diversity,” says UBC Botany Assoc. Prof. Patrick Keeling and CMDE Principal Investigator.
“Studying life on Earth with what little we know about microbes is like reading a book in which most of the words are written in invisible ink,” says Keeling. “New technology and an interdisciplinary approach are now allowing us to reveal the missing words and make sense of the world we live in.”
Exploring the diversity of microbial life forms and how they evolve is crucial to the understanding of ecological systems, says Keeling. CMDE researchers will incorporate expertise in molecular biology, comparative cell biology, evolutionary biology, genomics, proteomics, phylogenetics, ecology, paleontology and computational biology.
Founded in 2002 and based in British Columbia, the privately funded Tula Foundation supports programs in habitat conservation, global health and life sciences research.
The Tula Foundation is also supporting the recruitment of young faculty to the UBC Brain Research Centre through a $2.75-million grant over 2002-2006.
For more information on the Tula Foundation, visit www.tula.ca.
For more information on the CMDE, please visit www.cmde.science.ubc.ca.
Images of microbes are available at www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/download.
Background
Quick Facts About Microbes
- There are more bacteria in the human body than there are human cells.
- There are more bacteria on the Earth than there are stars in the known universe – by nine orders of magnitude. In other words, there are a billion bacteria for every star in the universe.
- Macroscopic, multicellular life is not unique to animals and plants, but has evolved at least seven times from microbial ancestors.
- Discovering new species is often associated with trekking through jungles on exotic islands, but thousands of new microbial species can be found in a single teaspoon of soil from our own backyard.
- The total weight of all the viruses in the ocean equals that of 75 million blue whales.
– 30 –
