Welcome to this website, which hosts materials, stories and images from the work at the Laboratory of Microbial Ecology, Ignacio Chapela directing, at the University of California, Berkeley.
What we do. Who we are. What we say.
What we read. What they say about us. Where we go.
Our friends. Not our friends.
About Microbial Ecology:
Most of life on Planet Earth is microbial. Degree of relatedness and diversity of known organisms, as depicted by the similarity of DNA sequences. After C. Woese.
The term ‘Microbial Ecology’ provides a wonderfully loose field of action for the biologist, since it describes our efforts to understand the life of invisible living beings by themselves and in their interactions. The definition of “microbe” is at once woefully naïve and powerfully challenging: if you are an organism with eyes to see, the world of microbes is simply that world which you cannot see. It just so happens that this world is vast, indeed comprising the majority of life forms on planet Earth. Even at this time, which some hypothetical historian of the future could call the Age of the Macrobes, microbes are in fact the main actors in the world. Of course if we take a real, dispassionate look at the history of life on the planet the picture is even more biased towards a world mostly dominated by microbes.
How to deal with microbes: a central aspect of our culture. Fear, the worst possible approach.
How we deal with the reality of our comparative insignificance vis-a-vis the microbial world, and which steps we take in the daunting task of even beginning to imagine how that world operates – this is the challenge of the microbial ecologist. Welcome!
What we do. Who we are. What we say.
What we read. What they say about us. Where we go.
Our friends. Not our friends.