We study real systems as they exist, in all their messy, interconnected glory, and figure out what's actually happening in there. Sometimes that means crawling underground, hiking through subterranean rivers, descending into the void, climbing landslides, braving polluted environments, or poking around our own backyard to see what we find.
We want to know which microbes have claimed the place, how that community changes from one spot to the next, and what chemistry they're producing to make a living there. Rock, soil, mud, water, human architecture, whatever they've got. So we sequence DNA, extract metabolites, shoot mud with an X-ray gun, and add in where and when everything is happening so we can start pulling apart how the system works.
We use microbiology, geology, chemistry, ecology, pharmacognosy, biomedicine, spatial analysis, whatever the question needs. Nature doesn't organize itself into academic departments, and neither do our questions. We look at the whole system together, then work with collaborators who dig deeper into the specific pieces and figure out what that system can actually give us, from new medicines and bioremediation to critical minerals and things we haven’t even thought to look for yet.
