From hot springs to subglacial lakes, from mammals' guts to plant roots, microbes colonize every corner of the planet forming intricate communities harboring thousands of interacting species. “Omics” technologies have been instrumental in advancing our knowledge of the taxonomic and metabolic diversity of microbial species in all these ecosystems. Yet, knowing which genomes are present in a given environment is not enough to understand how communities assemble and function.

Genes are strongly coupled with organisms and the community that harbors them. Environmental conditions affect gene expression and the realized community metabolisms, which in turn modify the environment. This feedback shapes interspecies interactions and community states. Physiology is key to decoding the gene-organism-environment triad, but our knowledge is limited to a few species in controlled laboratory conditions. However, getting a quantitative understanding of the physiology of all the microbial species present in a community is an impossible task. As such, to get a quantitative understanding of microbial assembly and function across environments, we need a framework to identify relevant coarse-grained physiological traits from (meta)genomes. To this end, a cross-disciplinary approach is required.

The program will assemble a diverse team of experts spanning the fields of environmental microbiology, microbial physiology, ecology, and physics to advance three core research areas: 1) understanding to which degree physiological strategies can be inferred from genomes, 2) define which traits are relevant for microbial community assembly and under which environmental conditions, and 3) develop a framework to integrate physiological traits into theories of microbial community assembly.