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]

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]

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]

Fungi play a key role in global warming because they bioconvert most of the plant-produced carbon sequestered in soil. Models of global change that incorporate biological feedback hinge on whether fungi will show enhanced bioconversion of recalcitrant carbon as temperatures rise. The first part of this project deals with learning more about fungi that have… [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]

Terrestrial deep shales and their interfaces are carbon-rich environments that represent a significant component of the U.S. energy portfolio. Energy resources in these environments have recently been accessed via hydraulic fracturing (i.e. “fracking”) technologies that introduce a complex mixture of biocides, surfactants, and other compounds into the shale matrix. This project aims to improve our… [Read More]

Climate change in the Arctic is progressing rapidly, thawing large areas of permafrost that contain nearly half of the world’s soil organic carbon. Once thawed, this soil carbon is first to be converted to dissolved organic carbon, which is then oxidized by microbes and sunlight to carbon dioxide. The conversion of this carbon pool to… [Read More]

Microbial metal and radionuclide reduction is central to a wide variety of processes, including biogeochemical metal cycling, hazardous organic matter degradation, and electricity generation in microbial fuel cells. Despite the potential benefit as alternative strategies for energy generation and radionuclide remediation, the molecular mechanism of microbial metal and radionuclide reduction remains poorly understood. Bacteria such… [Read More]