Course Objectives
	It is the goal of the course to provide an overview of the many facets of microbial ecology and diversity by investigating how microbial diversity emerged as the evolutionary product of mutation and selection defining the major prokaryotic inventions, those which remained and those which might have disappeared creating awareness of the impressive diversity in metabolic activities of microbes initiating contacts between scientific fields which are not usually combined encouraging a rapprochement between environmental microbiology, microbial ecology, geochemistry and earth history bringing together aspects of environmental and, in a few cases, medical and health oriented microbiology illustrating how microbes rule the world by showing how microbes interact to do their job optimally
	microeco