This year marks the Moore Foundation’s 25th anniversary. To commemorate this milestone, we launched a symposia series exploring topics related to the foundation’s mission. These events offer a chance to reflect on the progress of the past 25 years — and, as importantly, to envision the opportunities that lie ahead.
In June 2025, we partnered with the American Academy of Microbiology, the honorific leadership group of the American Society for Microbiology, to host a session at ASM Microbe 2025 in Los Angeles, California. Titled “Early Microbial Life: How Learning About the Origin of Life Informs Us About the Future,” the gathering centered on the release of a new report examining evolutionary trajectories of ancient microbial lineages and featured a live recording of the Meet the Microbiologist podcast.
The report and panel discussion were the culmination of several robust workshops.
“At the workshops, scientists dove into questions of deep evolutionary time,” said Jon Kaye, Ph.D., program director at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. “The report and discussion shed light on the state of play with several of the major transitions in microbial evolution and possibilities for how to pursue further research in these areas.”
Early Microbial Life: Our Past, Present and Future
ASM Microbe is the world’s largest microbiology conference and features sessions across a range of microbial science topics. During this year’s meeting, more than 125 people attended the session on the release of the new report on early microbial life.
The report was the result of a series of workshops that brought together experts from diverse areas, including geobiology, paleontology, oceanography, biophysics, bioinformatics, modeling, microbiology, cell biology, virology, evolutionary biology, and evolutionary genetics. The final product summed up lessons from three workshops that assessed the state of play and brainstormed future research opportunities in this burgeoning interdisciplinary field. Each session focused on a different topic:
- The origin of cellular life and the evolution of prokaryotic lineages.
- The development of cellular functions that led to the evolution of major eukaryotic groups.
- The repeated emergence of multicellularity in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms.
Michael Lynch, Ph.D. and Vaughn Cooper, Ph.D. co-chaired the steering committee that compiled the final report. They were joined by project participants Tom Williams, Ph.D., Julia Schwartzman, Ph.D., and Purificación López-García, Ph.D. for an in-depth panel discussion at ASM Microbe.
Report contributors concluded that to understand how life on Earth has evolved, we need to continue exploring how microbial lineages created and adapted to new evolutionary niches and became more complex and diverse. Answering these questions will be an ongoing endeavor, and technological developments including advancements in microscopy, synthetic biology, and single-cell sequencing will help scientists accelerate progress.
The report demonstrates how integrating expertise across distinct lines of inquiry holds potential to unlock discoveries that no single discipline can achieve alone. It reinforces the importance of scientific collaboration and how the knowledge gleaned from studying microbial origins will benefit from — and benefit — the advancement of numerous scientific fields.
“Microbial science touches so many areas, and it’s important to bring the community together. This report is a testament to the value of taking a collaborative approach and connecting researchers from across the world. Combined with other efforts such as our support for research on aquatic symbiosis, we are working to empower scientists and facilitate interdisciplinary science.”
— Jon Kaye, Ph.D.
Meet the Microbiologist
After the panel discussion, Ashley Hagen, M.S. sat down with Drs. Lynch and Cooper to record an episode of the Meet the Microbiologist podcast on the ASM Microbe exhibit floor. The podcast series focuses on showcasing some of the brightest minds in the microbial science community, covering areas like genomics, public health, and more.
In this episode, also titled Early Microbial Life: Our Past, Present and Future, they discussed the report, examining the major transitions in microbial evolution and how advanced technologies and capabilities could drive future, groundbreaking progress in science.
“We’re not going to know every detail. We may never understand exactly where life originated on earth, or maybe not even if it originated here, but the basic principles that are emerging are going to teach us a lot about just basic biology that applies to all organisms,” Lynch said during the recording.
See the full catalogue of Meet the Microbiologist episodes on the American Society for Microbiology website.
Looking ahead
Among the principles of our founders, Gordon and Betty Moore was the imperative of finding important, leading-edge scientific niches where the scale of the foundation’s contributions could make a substantial difference, and to create synergies whereby the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Panelists from the event. From left to right: Nguyen Nguyen, Ph.D., Jon Kaye, Ph.D., Tom Williams, Ph.D., Michael Lynch, Ph.D., Julia Schwartzman, Ph.D., Purificación López-García, Ph.D., Vaughn Cooper, Ph.D.
“The academy’s report and these discussions served as an opportunity to better understand new research avenues and opportunities,” said Dr. Kaye. “At the foundation, we value the opportunity to bring together experts to envision what the frontiers of science could look like over the coming decades.”
The foundation has a long history of supporting advancements in microbial science, including the now-concluded Marine Microbiology Initiative, the ongoing Symbiosis in Aquatic Systems Initiative, and other grantmaking. As the report illustrates, there is exciting potential for growth in the field, and the foundation will continue to explore these opportunities.
Early Microbial Life was the second of the five-part 25th anniversary symposia series.
Message sent
Thank you for sharing.