The microbial community inhabiting Antarctica’s Lake Vida resides in a block of ice several meters thick that has a large reservoir of liquid brine entrained in the ice below 14 meters and a mixture of ice/icy sediment layers below 21 meters. The ice-entrained, anoxic brine is among the coldest, stable liquid cryoecosystems known on Earth…
Carbon Processing in the Sea
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…
DNA & RNA datasets from forest soil communities
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…
Arctic microbial community diversity
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…
Recovering freshwater metagenomes
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…
Microbial studies of Lake Erie’s “dead zone”
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…