John Spear, an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Colorado School of Mines is an environmental microbiologist, looking for the kinds of microbes in any number of environments from a hot spring in Yellowstone to the average beer.
The invisible microbial world surrounds us and is part of us with a diversity of life that dwarfs the visible, macrobial world. With both traditional cultivation approaches and recent molecular approaches of DNA and RNA sequencing, work in the microbial world is beginning to reveal the secrets of life and its evolution. With an examination of the kinds of microbes that are in rocks, the kinds of microbes that cause corrosion of steel and the kinds of microbes that are critical for water treatment, new possibilities become apparent for biotechnology—how to work with mine tailings, how to work with rust, how to make a better protein and how to make a better beer!