The project aims to sequence the genomes of 100 strains of the genus Thioalkalivibrio. Members of this genus have an enormous metabolic and genetic diversity. Isolated from various soda lakes around the world, the strains were selected for their industrial relevance in the sustainable removal of sulfur from waste streams and energy carriers, such as… [Read More]

Serpentinization is a common process that is extremely important for transporting water towards the mantle and for fixing large amounts of carbon as carbonate rocks. The Cedars Peridotite is a site in Northern California where active serpentinization occurs, resulting in spring waters that are so extreme that no current paradigms of microbial metabolism are compatible… [Read More]

The study of wood breakdown into simple sugars is an important field of research due to its possible application in biofuel production. Developing S. commune as a model system to study the processes of wood degradation would allow researchers to study roles of enzymes in a fungus for which exist many protocols for studying genes… [Read More]

The poles are still one of them most unexplored ecosystems on our planet in terms of microbial genetic diversity. While marine microbes in this region are known to emit greenhouse gases such as dimethyl sulfide, not much is known yet about the molecular underpinnings of these globally important processes, nor how the microbes drive these… [Read More]

Lakes serve as sentinels and integrators of large-scale environmental change because they respond rapidly to climatic drivers and are tightly connected to their surrounding landscapes. Microbial communities drive the flow of carbon through these lakes by processing dissolved organic carbon, breaking down particulate organic carbon, fixing and respiring large quantities of carbon dioxide, quenching methane… [Read More]

Forests are vast ecosystems with critical functions in global nutrient cycling. They also represent an enormous and potentially sustainable source of biomass feedstock for the production of fuels, chemicals and materials. Samples from well-characterized Long- Term Soil Productivity Study (LTSP) sites representing six distinct ecoregions across North America will be compared to reveal effects on… [Read More]

Marine bacterioplankton comprise the largest living surface area in the sea. They detect, transport, and assimilate bioreactive constituents from the dissolved organic carbon pool, transforming them to particulate matter or recycling them back to an inorganic form. Ruegeria pomeroyi DSS-3 was isolated in 1998 from southeastern U.S. coastal seawater and has become a model organism… [Read More]

The Laurentian Great Lakes are the largest group of lakes on Earth, containing a fifth of near-surface and liquid freshwater globally. Lake Erie has a human-dominated watershed and has witnessed recurrent summertime oxygen depletion for a century or more. Conditions favor the formation of an expansive summer “dead zone,” comparable in surface area to the low… [Read More]

Fungi are the organisms of choice as hosts for production of ethanol and other biofuels from plant material, and can serve as powerful model systems for environmental and ecological science. One of the challenges in analyzing fungal genomes is functional annotation as even in the best-studied model filamentous fungus, some 40 percent of genes have… [Read More]

The Fusarium solani (FSSC) and F. oxysporum (FOSC) species complexes are two fungal clades adapted to diverse ecological niches, including plant pathogenicity on diverse hosts and the ability to engage in unique metabolic activities. Members of the FSSC and FOSC cause some of the most destructive and intractable diseases across a diverse spectrum of hosts,… [Read More]