Multimodal Microbiome Measurements
Material Measurement Laboratory, Chemical Sciences Division
NIST only participates in the February and August reviews.
Microbiomes play critical and often undescribed roles in a myriad of environments including the skin and gut of humans, soils and sediments, and water columns. These diverse assemblies of microorganisms are capable of affecting human, organismal and plant health as well as key biogeochemical cycles. This project seeks to facilitate modern bioanalytical measurements to characterize these complex communities by developing sample preparation techniques that are compatible with NMR and mass spectrometry-based techniques. This will allow parallel multimodal analysis including proteomic, metabolomic and lipidomic approaches. These methods will be foundational to studies of microbiome dynamics and functions. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of this project we are seeking applicants with experience in microbiology, mass spectrometry based proteomics, metabolomics and lipidomics, NMR based metabolomics, and/or bioinformatics.