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…
Fungal Response to Global Change
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…
Creating Saccharomyces functional annotation libraries
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…
Plant pathogens with supernumerary chromosomes
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,…
Microbial Diversity in Deep Shale
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…
Metabolic Degradation of Permafrost Organic Matter
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…
Novel Proteins with Metal Sensing Capabilities
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…
Phosphorus Response in Plant-Microbe Symbioses
While plant-microbe symbioses play critical roles in enhancing nutrient acquisition and ecosystem productivity, little information is available on the complex metabolic and signaling pathways that mediate such responses. In this project, researchers specifically plan to study the influences of ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi and plant growth promoting bacteria (PGPB) on the phosphorus starvation response in aspen…
Studying the Columbia River SIZ
The zone of groundwater-surface water mixing, known as the Subsurface Interaction Zone (SIZ), is a critical and ubiquitous domain at the groundwater-surface water interface that strongly influences carbon and nitrogen cycling and regulates contaminant releases to surface waters. Researchers want to understand how groundwater-surface water mixing dynamics impact microbial communities. For this project, the work…
Methanogen Models to Maximize Biofuel Production
Methanogens—anaerobic microbes that perform the final step of biomass degradation in the carbon cycle—convert carbon dioxide or monoxide, acetate, methanol, methyl-sulfides and methylamines into methane as part of their core metabolic system. They represent an integral piece of the global carbon cycle as an estimated 350 million tons of methane are produced yearly by methanogens….