As a young bacteriologist just launching my career during the early days of the ‘microbial revolution’ in the 1980s, I was fortunate to participate in some early discoveries, and collaborate in the development of cross‐disciplinary methods now commonly referred to as "metagenomics". My early scientific career focused on applying phylogenetic and genomic approaches to characterize ‘wild’ bacteria, archaea and viruses in their natural habitats, with an emphasis on marine systems. These central interests have not changed very much for me over the past three decades, but knowledge, methodological advances and new theoretical perspectives about the microbial world certainly have. In this invited ‘How we did it’ perspective, I trace some of the trajectories of my lab's collective efforts over the years, including phylogenetic surveys of microbial assemblages in marine plankton and sediments, development of microbial community gene‐ and genome‐enabled surveys, and application of genome‐guided, cultivation‐independent functional characterization of novel enzymes, pathways and their relationships to in situ biogeochemistry. Throughout this short review, I attempt to acknowledge, all the mentors, students, postdocs and collaborators who enabled this research. Inevitably, a brief autobiographical review like this cannot be fully comprehensive, so sincere apologies to any of my great colleagues who are not explicitly mentioned herein. I salute you all as well!

中文翻译：

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海洋微生物生态学和进化的基因组探索：涨潮掀起所有船只

作为一名在 1980 年代“微生物革命”初期刚刚开始我的职业生涯的年轻细菌学家，我有幸参与了一些早期发现，并合作开发了现在通常被称为“宏基因组学”的跨学科方法. 我早期的科学生涯专注于应用系统发育和基因组方法来表征自然栖息地中的“野生”细菌、古细菌和病毒，重点是海洋系统。在过去的三十年里，这些核心兴趣对我来说并没有太大变化，但是关于微生物世界的知识、方法论的进步和新的理论观点肯定有了。在这个受邀的“我们是如何做到的”视角中，我追溯了我实验室多年来集体努力的一些轨迹，原位生物地球化学。在这篇简短的评论中，我试图感谢所有促成这项研究的导师、学生、博士后和合作者。不可避免地，像这样简短的自传体评论不可能完全全面，因此向本文未明确提及的任何一位伟大的同事表示诚挚的歉意。我也向大家致敬！