Microbe sleuth
Microbes may seem small and insignificant, but in evolutionary terms the tiny organisms punch far above their weight. Although only a few micrometers in size, microbes have been responsible for shaping much of the world around us, including the air that we breathe and the ground that we walk on. Indeed, there would be no life on Earth without them, says Tanja Bosak, the recently tenured Hayes Career Development Associate Professor of Geobiology at MIT. “We really owe microbes a lot, because there would be no complex life on Earth without these bugs having figured out how to split water and produce oxygen,” she says. Bosak, who is also director of the MIT Laboratory for Geomicrobiology and Microbial Sedimentology, investigates how life and the environment evolved together during the early years of Earth’s history. “I’m interested in how we can tell what microbes were doing over large periods of Earth’s history when there...