ORNL, UC Berkeley unravel real-world clues to Earth's...( ome' but also the resulting 'community...)

Hettich said their results would not have been possible without the collaboration with UC Berkeley, where Jill Banfield is an expert in natural microbial communities. Banfield, a professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, has studied this particular acid mine drainage community for several years. Meanwhile, ORNL boasts world-class mass spectrometry instrumentation and its researchers have demonstrated success in obtaining proteome information on simple microbial organisms grown in the laboratory. Working as a team, UC Berkeley and ORNL have struck it rich.

"Through this collaboration, Jill Banfield has been able to take her research up a quantum step by obtaining the first glimpse into the complex proteome dataset of this microbial community," Hettich said. "To do this, it was critical that we bring together researchers with expertise in biology and ecology of microbial communities, analytical technologies and bioinformatics."

Banfield and colleagues at UC Berkeley supplied the bacterial samples and characterized genome information while Hettich and Nathan VerBerkmoes, a post-doctoral student in ORNL's Chemical Sciences Division, performed the mass spectrometry work. Manesh Shah of ORNL's Life Sciences Division was responsible for the informatics related to database searching and data dissemination. The team detected 2,036 proteins from the five most abundant species in the bio-film, including 48 percent of the predicted proteins from the most abundant bio-film organism, Leptosprillum group II.

Researchers noted that this work represents the first large-scale proteomics-level exami
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Contact: Ron Walli
wallira@ornl.gov
865-576-0226
DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
5-May-2005