The world around us is largely inhabited and maintained by a vast army of unseen microorganisms. Until the advent of genomics tools we were unaware of just how prevalent and important these organisms were to life on our planet. While much work has been done in trying to understand this microbial world, the surface has only been scratched. Since our sequencing of the first free-living bacterium, Haemophilus influenza, JCVI scientists have been leading the field of microbial genomics. - See more at: http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/groups/microbial-environmental-genomics/#sthash.EmGOFP1b.dpuf