(124d) Life in a Tight Spot: Visualizing Microbial Transport Processes in the Ground Beneath Our Feet

Human life would not exist on earth without soil microbes: they play critical roles in biogeochemical cycling, sustaining plant growth, and degrading contaminants. These processes rely on the coupling between microbial transport (motility & growth), chemical transport (diffusion & advection), and chemical reactions (consumption & production of nutrients/signals) in the ground beneath our feet. As such, studying and developing ways to control microbial life in soil is an exciting frontier for chemical engineering. In this talk, I will describe my group's work using tools from soft matter engineering, 3D imaging, and biophysical & transport modeling to (i) directly visualize microbes from the scale of a single cell to that of an entire multi-cellular collective, (ii) 3D-print precisely structured collectives, and (iii) model their large-scale motion and growth in complex environments akin to soil. In doing so, we are working to establish quantitative principles to predict and control microbial life in soil—with implications for agriculture, biodiversity, bioremediation, environment, and global ecology.