The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has selected Oregon State University College of Pharmacy researcher, Dr. Kerry McPhail, Ph.D. to lead a study of chemical signaling and metabolite production among microbial communities whose origins trace back billions of years.
Dr. McPhail will work with collaborators at the University of Wisconsin, the University of California, San Diego, and Rhodes University in South Africa to study stromatolites, one of the two types of microbialites. Thrombolites are the other.
Stromatolite pool
Source: OSU News and Research
“‘Stromatolite’ is generally recognized to refer to the earliest known fossils of cyanobacterial-rich microbial mats, from the Archaean and Precambrian eras,” said McPhail, who received a $1,415,223 grant from the Moore Foundation. “These have been of intense geobiological and geochemical interest with regard to theories on the origin of life, and also biomineralization and lithification as related to global carbon cycling.”
Dr. McPhail was selected by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for a Marine Microbiology Initiative grant.
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Source: OSU News and Research