Moisture and seasonal drivers of Inter-Kingdom metabolic interaction in a marginal soil rhizosphere
EMSL Project ID
60449
Abstract
Soil is a complex environment with numerous competing and cooperating populations contributing to overall ecosystem services. Plants provide most of the fresh organic carbon inputs through growth and death cycles and root exudation. Plant-derived organic matter is metabolized by a combination of fungal, bacterial, and archaeal communities. These three domains are further shaped by viral activity, which alters both the community structure (through predation) and function (through disease perturbation and/or the transfer of auxiliary metabolic genes). We will extend our SFA investigations of how soil moisture and seasonal changes affect carbon metabolism in marginal soils by quantifying and modeling the bacterial, archaeal, fungal and viral community compositions and activities in the rhizosphere. This comprehensive survey of community composition and activity will allow us to construct metabolic models for prediction of cross-Kingdom interactions. We will sample our experimental plots across moisture treatments and seasons and fractionate soil samples into viral, bacterial/archaeal, and fungal components to precisely determine community composition. We propose to collaborate with JGI and EMSL to generate multi-omic data to profile expressed functions. We predict that, during the growing season, greater availability and access to rhizodeposition (labile C compounds) in high moisture plots will promote higher bacterial and bacteriophage abundances, while low moisture will show increased importance of fungal metabolic activity, as evidenced by increased metabolic reliance of the bacterial/archaeal fraction on metabolites produced by the fungi, due to the spatial connectivity provided by their hyphal networks. Comparing seasonal conditions, the low temperatures and plant senescence which occur in winter, reduce availability of labile C compounds, which will reduce bacterial/archaeal activity, resulting in lower viral abundances and a greater dependence on fungal activity for C transformation. The overall metabolic potential of the total community will be resistant to perturbations due to functional redundancy across organisms. Data collected will be used to build and parameterize separate 'mixed-bag' metabolic network models for the bacterial/archaeal and fungal communities to examine direct and indirect effects of environmental perturbations on carbon cycling.
Project Details
Project type
FICUS Research
Start Date
2022-10-01
End Date
N/A
Status
Active
Released Data Link
Team
Principal Investigator
Co-Investigator(s)
Team Members