Announcement: Guest Lecture in March!

Microbiome is an emerging field of research on the microbial communities (i.e., microbiota) and their “theatre of activity”. The past two decades in the 21st century have witnessed dramatically increasing application of high-throughput DNA sequencing-based metagenomics and other meta-omics approaches (e.g., metatranscriptomics, metaproteomics and metabolomics) for exploring and describing various natural (e.g., soil, ocean and air) and anthropogenic (e.g., human guts and bioreactors) microbiomes. The central questions of today’s mainstream Microbiome Research should include (but are not limited to): (i) how to comprehensively and cost-efficiently identify microbial communities? (ii) how the community structured or assembled to determine its function? (iii) how to precisely design and targeted regulate the community function? In this mix-up lecture, I will first give a brief introduction on the background for microbiome research, then talk about the mainstream microbiome methodologies with highlights on our past-decade applications and key findings in exploring the intriguing sciences of microbiome and antibiotic resistome (i.e., the collection of antibiotic restance genes) in wastewater treatment plants, bioreactors and other engineered microbial ecosystems. The research outcomes shed lights on the microbiome sciences underlying the core functions of typical environmetnal engineering systems and open research avenues for enhancing environmental biotechnology and human health via synthetic communties and microbiome engineering, an emering solution to tackle challenges in the fields of Industrial Biotechnology, Health & Medicine, Food & Agriculture, Environ. Biotechnology, and Bioenergy by strengthening functional and translational microbiome research and biotechnological innovations that advance the nextgeneration bioeconomy.