Microbial mats and stromatolites harbor complex communities of microorganism which conduct different biochemical reactions. Many of these microorganisms cannot grow independently in the natural environment without the other members of the community. However in order to understand how the entire system works together, it is often necessary to study a single type of microorganism at a time. The first step to this endeavor is to isolate the microbe of interest into pure culture so that its ecological behavior and metabolism can be studied. Once we understand how it lives, then we can begin to piece together how and why it is able to survive and grow in a particular community and how it interacts with the other microorganisms in that environment.

Once a microorganism is isolated and studied we then add it to our culture collection. Here we keep detailed photographic records as well as notes about where the organism came from and how it was growing. The collection provides microorganisms that we can use for experiments or to grow laboratory microbial mats and stromatolites under specialized conditions. This also gives us a powerful reference databank of live organisms whose characteristics and properties such as biomarker composition (see Lipid Biomarker Laboratory) and partial DNA sequence are known. We can compare this information with that of new microbes found in the natural environment. Such comparisons allow us to see how different (or similar) organisms from different parts of the world are. This also improves our ability to understand and interpret ancient environments and how microbes and their environment have affected one another through time.