Geomicrobiology Network history

At the March 2014 meeting of the Mineralogical Society’s Council, a new Geomicrobiology Network was formed. It will operate in the same way as the Society’s Special Interest Groups. The Society for General Microbiology committed to supporting the network for an initial three-year period, to be reviewed at that stage.
We are lucky to host a very strong geomicrobiology community in the UK, but until now, there has been no dedicated forum to support it. At the interface between geology and the biosciences, it has traditionally fallen between the core interests of several of our learned societies.  Research areas include astrobiology, bioenergetics, bioleaching, biomineralisation, bionanotechnology, bioremediation, bioweathering, deep biosphere, environmental genomics, geomycology, microbe-metal/radionuclide interactions, microbial fuel cells and structural biology.

A preliminary scientific meeting of the new network (with support from the Environmental Mineralogy Group, the Mineralogical Society, the Society for General Microbiology, the Geological Society of London and the British Mycological Society), held in Manchester in April 2012 had the aim to build a sustainable network that can better support this rapidly moving research area.