Projects | Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory

As a scientific user facility, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) provides expertise, instrumentation, and resources to 250 projects each year. Current and past projects supported through a variety of EMSL user proposal avenues are publicly searchable on the EMSL website.

Browse current and past research projects supported by the EMSL User Facility.

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Project pages provide details including:

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The EMSL project DOI
Link to project data available in EMSL’s Data Portal
Project type

The elusive structure and function of peatland fine roots

Lead Institution

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Principal Investigator

Avni Malhotra

Project type

Exploratory Research

Peatlands store one-third of the global soil organic carbon pool. Yet, the climate change responses of plant roots, which directly contact and shape this pool, remain elusive. We aim to estimate…

Systems-level identification and comparison of Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans tolerance mechanisms to cobalt, lithium, and nickel

Lead Institution

National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Principal Investigator

Allison Werner

Project type

Exploratory Research

The United States’ clean energy transition is reliant on sustainable and secure mineral supply chains as clean energy technologies require 4-6X the critical minerals of the conventional analogs (e.g…

Methanotrophy inside-out: metals and metabolism

Lead Institution

San Diego State University

Principal Investigator

Marina Kalyuzhnaya

Project type

Exploratory Research

Methylotrophs are among the key players in the environmental cycling of C1-compounds, such as methanol and/or methane. The oxidation of C1-compounds requires a number of minerals including Cu, Fe, Ca…

A multi-omics approach to reveal cell-type-specific lipid metabolism in stomatal cells of bioenergy crops.

Lead Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Principal Investigator

Andrew Leakey

Project type

Exploratory Research

Triacylglycerol (TAG) is a significant source of biofuel and industrial products but only accumulates to high levels in oilseed crops e.g. soybean and canola. Increasing demand is prompting efforts…

Resilience of Amino Acid-Mineral Assemblages

Lead Institution

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Principal Investigator

Maya Engel

Project type

Exploratory Research

The persistence of organic matter (OM)-mineral assemblages in soils relies on their ability to resist chemical change. Association of OM and/or Si within mineral assemblages serves a dual purpose – 1…

Quantifying the Contribution of Methylotrophy to Methane Production from Freshwater Wetlands

Lead Institution

Colorado State University

Principal Investigator

Jared Ellenbogen

Project type

Exploratory Research

Developing a holistic understanding of carbon cycling in wetlands - which is needed to improve the predictive abilities of process based biogeochemical models for estimating terrestrial net methane…

Visualizing the Unknown: Structural elucidation of CLR-3, a domain-of-unknown-function protein from Neurospora crassa

Lead Institution

Technische Universität München

Principal Investigator

J. Philipp Benz

Project type

Exploratory Research

Plant cell walls (PCW) offer a diverse range of fermentable carbohydrates that can be utilized for the production of biorefined products. Filamentous fungi are widely recognized for their efficient…

Tracking microbial microplastic transformations in marine waters using stable isotope-informed metaproteogenomics

Lead Institution

University of British Columbia

Principal Investigator

Ryan Ziels

Project type

Exploratory Research

Plastics have become a pervasive component of industrial and domestic products within the global economy, with an estimated 6300 million metric tons of plastic waste generated by 2015. The magnitude…

Characterizing rhizosphere size and composition under distinct plant water use strategies

Lead Institution

Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station

Principal Investigator

Itamar Shabtai

Project type

Exploratory Research

Plant roots exude water and metabolites into the rhizosphere, to condition their environment and to foster symbiotic relationships with soil microorganisms which, in exchange, provide essential…

Characterization of micro- and nano-plastics formed and emitted from biomass burning

Lead Institution

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

Principal Investigator

Marwa El-Sayed

Project type

Exploratory Research

Biomass burning has become a significant source of air pollution in the US, especially with the increased frequency and intensity of wildfires not only in the western US but also recently in the…

Impact of Salinity on DOM Release from Soils Following Seawater Inundation

Lead Institution

Argonne National Laboratory

Principal Investigator

Edward O'Loughlin

Project type

Exploratory Research

A recent large-scale field manipulation experiment exposed large coastal forest plots to extreme flooding by estuarine water and fresh water. Elevated dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentrations…

Exploratory Analysis of Glycine Peptide Sorption on Ferrihydrite using Calorimetric Techniques and Molecular Dynamics Simulations

Lead Institution

Texas Christian University

Principal Investigator

Omar Harvey

Project type

Exploratory Research

Ferrihydrite-organic matter associations are ubiquitous in the environment and can control the kinetics and favorability of biogeochemical processes. However, the dynamics and energetics of organic…

New insights into phosphorus (P) acquisition strategies by quantifying untargeted metabolites in dryland soils

Lead Institution

University of Texas at El Paso

Principal Investigator

Kalpana Kukreja

Project type

Exploratory Research

Earth’s Critical Zone (CZ) plays a key role in sustaining life through carbon, water, and nutrient cycling from the top of the canopy to groundwater. A key feature of critical zone research is to…

Size-resolved Physicochemical Properties of Biomass Burning Aerosol

Lead Institution

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Principal Investigator

ManishKumar Shrivastava

Project type

Exploratory Research

Biomass burning aerosol (BBA) is a major component of atmospheric aerosols and plays critical roles in the climate. BBA can affect climate directly by absorbing and scattering light, causing overall…

Metabolomics imaging of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi to inform a tri-partite metabolic model

Lead Institution

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Principal Investigator

Erin Nuccio

Project type

Exploratory Research

Developing environmentally sustainable sources of energy is a grand challenge of the 21st century. Plant feedstocks are promising renewable sources for sustainable aviation and transportation fuels,…

Measuring Physical, Chemical and Optical Properties and Ice Nucleation Activities of Aerosol Particles in the European Arctic

Lead Institution

National Research Council - Institute of Polar Sciences CNR-ISP

Principal Investigator

Stefania Gilardoni

Project type

Exploratory Research

Aerosols in the Arctic have important but poorly constrained impacts on the regional climate. They affect the regional radiation and energy budgets directly by absorbing (warming effect) and…

High resolution mapping of global cropland greenhouse gas emissions under changing climate

Lead Institution

Cornell University

Principal Investigator

Dominic Woolf

Project type

Exploratory Research

There is growing interest in the wide-scale deployment of soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestration strategies in croplands. SOC sequestration in agriculture if widely considered to be a cost…

AlphaEnzyme: predicting enzyme functions directly from AlphaFold encoding

Lead Institution

Kent State University

Principal Investigator

Qiang Guan

Project type

Exploratory Research

Predicting the function of enzyme (represented as an enzyme commission number, or EC number) is one of the central tasks in annotating genomes and metagenomes. It is crucial for understanding the…

Detailed Analysis of Sulfur Isotopic Signatures via Atom Probe Tomography

Lead Institution

University of Toronto

Principal Investigator

Daniel Gregory

Project type

Exploratory Research

Pyrite is the end sink of sulfur in organic rich sedimentary environments. It is important both because sulfate is important for respiration of many organisms at low oxygen concentrations and because…

Proton paths in biological systems: Composition, stability, and requirements for transmitting protons

Lead Institution

City College of New York

Principal Investigator

Michael Green

Project type

Exploratory Research

Using structures from known proton transmitters, we will calculate, using DFT, the energy for successive proton positions, the bonding with the protons in these positions, and the charges on the…

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