Microorganisms make up a huge but largely unknown part of the biosphere. Developing a better understanding of the complex interactions between microorganisms and their surrounding environments, including soil, requires developing new methodologies. Many of them rely heavily on computation techniques. Joseph provides some biological background, at a level accessible to a computer science audience. She then discusses the computational work that is currently being done in this area. Finally, she talks about the much larger collection of problems that remains unsolved. From the Series:Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing