The researchers used molecular tools to characterize microbial communities in the changing biogeochemistry of Lake Michigan (2012-2015) and across the Laurentian Great Lakes.

Story: IISG researchers identify microbes throughout the Great Lakes

The objective of this work is to characterize microbial metabolism across a gradient of impacted sites in southwest Lake Michigan, spanning NE Illinois to NW Indiana.

While microbes tend to alter their environments as ecosystem engineers, their existence is a function of their environment. Any organism has a range of conditions it can tolerate; aquatic microbes and their metabolisms are generally dependent on temperature, pH, light, and resource availability. Humans also tend to significantly alter our environment, and we have shown the ability to cause change much faster than microbes. Our increase of the planet’s temperature through greenhouse gas emissions will increase water temperatures and further reduce ice cover over the coming decades. On a finer scale, industrial practices emit pollutants into the coastal air, soil, sediments, and waters. The effects of these actions, prevalent in southwest Lake Michigan,
are poorly understood and disproportionately felt by low-income and minority communities.

This project proposes to collect samples from various parts of Lake Michigan as proof of concept for a new “Environment to Bioassay” approach being developed. Using this approach, we can accomplish many stages of the microbial drug discovery pipeline directly from single bacterial colonies in a semi-automated fashion, bringing a huge advantage in terms of scale and capacity to access diverse portions of Lake Michigan’s microbiome for rapid antibiotic discovery. Furthermore, understanding the bio-assets from Lake Michigan will be key in informing how to best sustainably manage a critical resource and preserve this area. I plan to integrate my research project with an educational outreach program in partnership with the James Jordan Boys and Girls Club of Chicago.