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Jeffrey M Dick
Summary
In the field of geochemical biology, computational tools from geochemistry are used to learn about microbial growth and evolution. Instead of asking questions like “who’s there and what are they doing?”, geochemical biology uses molecular data to ask “what are they made of, and how does that depend on the environment?” Basic chemical constituents including water, oxygen, and hydrogen are essential for cellular interactions with the environment. What do oxidation and hydration conditions mean for protein expression levels during organismal growth, how is microbial community composition linked to redox and salinity, and how does genomic adaptation reflect oxygen levels through time and in different habitats? Finding the answers to these questions can tell us about past environmental changes like the Great Oxidation Event and help to understand the physicochemical interactions between our bodies and their microbial inhabitants. The quantitative basis for these insights is chemical thermodynamics, which requires new tools for processing sequence data to get chemical information and thermodynamic models that place biomolecular evolution in the same framework as inorganic geochemistry.
Bioinformatics Evolutionary Studies Genomics Microbiology Oncology Thermodynamics & Statistical Mechanics