Professor Clarissa Nobile is changing the way we look at microbes. She wants to understand them as they’re found in nature, not as they exist in the laboratory. And she was just awarded a five-year, $1.89 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to bolster her efforts.
Nobile received the Maximizing Investigators' Research Award (MIRA) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS). Known as the Outstanding Investigator Award, it’s the first of its kind ever awarded to a UC Merced faculty member.
It’s yet another mark of distinction for Nobile, who became UC Merced’s first Pew scholar in 2015, and this year was named part of the Merced Sun-Star’s first 20 Under 40 class.
Nobile’s newest grant allows considerable latitude to pursue projects of her choosing.
“The MIRA gives investigators more flexibility to take risks and explore,” Nobile said. “It’s an investment in the investigator, not a specific project.”
To those unfamiliar with how research funding works, that might not sound like a big deal. But this isn’t how funding typically gets doled out.
Funding agencies prefer to back projects with narrow aims and clearly defined outcomes. Open-ended exploration is seen as too risky to merit investment. According to Nobile, this has its drawbacks.
“The standard funding mechanisms favor small, incremental advances over big breakthroughs,” Nobile said.
But funding agencies are exploring new ways to support scientists. They’re starting to fund open-ended projects in the hope that they’ll lead to major advances. It’s a riskier way of doing science, but funding agencies are betting that some researchers are worth the risk. In Nobile’s case, the NIH is betting that her work will change the way we understand microbes.
Microbes Team Up to Form Biofilms
What do you see when you imagine a microbe?
Most people picture a lone, rod-shaped cell — perhaps with a flagellum attached — swimming frenetically in a drop of murky water. This vision of the solitary microbe is a false construct, an anomaly emerging from a long history of studying bacteria, yeast and other microscopic organisms under artificial conditions.
In nature, microbes are anything but solitary. They aggregate to form biofilms — crowded microbial communities that communicate, collaborate and compete. As biofilms, they secrete chemicals that protect them from the external environment. But these same compounds cause them to stick together, literally linking the fate of the individual to the community.
