Projects

Detecting Seismically-Sustained Deep Subsurface CH4-cycling Chemolithoautotrophic Microbial Communities Using Multi-Omic Analyses and NanoSIMS

Lead Institution

Princeton University

Principal Investigator

Tullis Onstott

Project type

FICUS Research

The specific objective of the proposed JGI/EMSL project is to document the microbial ecosystem of an active fault zone at 3.5 to 3.6 kilometers depth in South Africa. More specifically, the goal is…

Characterizing the ecophysiologies of uncultured syntrophic associations driving anaerobic methane oxidation: applications of targeted meta'omics and multi-modal analytical imaging of diverse archaeal-bacterial consortia

Lead Institution

California Institute of Technology

Principal Investigator

Victoria Orphan

Project type

FICUS Research

The main objective of this work is to combine the molecular, elemental and cryo-electron imaging and metaproteomics available at EMSL with the single cell genomics pipeline at the JGI in a highly…

Systems Analysis of Trophic Transitions in Chromochloris zofingiensis, an Emerging Model Green Alga with Promising Biofuel Potential

Lead Institution

University of California, Berkeley

Principal Investigator

Krishna Niyogi

Project type

FICUS Research

As a core component of a sustainable bio-economy, microalgae have the potential to become a major source of biofuels and bioproducts without exacerbating environmental problems. These photosynthetic…

Biodiversity and ice-nucleating activity of soil and marine airborne microorganisms and relationship to source material

Lead Institution

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Principal Investigator

Susannah Burrows

Project type

FICUS Research

Understanding the nature, sources, and geographic and seasonal distribution of atmospheric ice nucleating particles (INPs), i.e., particles that promote freezing of cloud droplets, is critical to…

Towards a molecular-level understanding of terrestrial organic matter transformations by microbes in a rapidly changing Arctic Ocean

Lead Institution

Concordia University

Principal Investigator

David Walsh

Project type

FICUS Research

The fate of terrestrial organic matter in coastal seas and open oceans is not well understood. This is especially true in the Arctic Ocean, which is one of the largest depositories of terrestrial…

Revealing the Molecular Interactions in Phototroph-Heterotroph Co-Cultures for Bioenergy Through Development of an In Silico Platform for Design and Discovery

Lead Institution

Johns Hopkins University

Principal Investigator

Michael Betenbaugh

Project type

FICUS Research

Lichens are nature's solar cells, harnessing energy from sunlight and converting it along with CO2 into biochemicals. They achieve this goal through a complex web of interactions between a…

Deciphering interactions hypothesized to lead to high productivity in high pH-high alkalinity phototrophically driven microbial communities

Lead Institution

Montana State University

Principal Investigator

Robin Gerlach

Project type

FICUS Research

Developing algal-based biofuels and bioproducts is one of the goals of the Department of Energy-Bioenergy Technology Office (DOE-BETO). The work proposed here focuses on an algal strain, tentatively…

Understanding genomic underpinnings of high-biomass productivity phenotypes in industrially relevant microalgae

Lead Institution

Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory

Principal Investigator

Alex Beliaev

Project type

FICUS Research

Directed evolution and targeted trait selection remain among the most powerful and successful tools available for attaining the process improvements necessary to enable commercial success in many…

Sunlight exposure replaces the function of microbial enzymes needed to degrade DOM

Lead Institution

Oregon State University

Principal Investigator

Byron Crump

Project type

FICUS Research

About half of the dissolved organic matter (DOM) released from land is converted to CO2 in inland waters (e.g., streams, rivers, lakes), driving a CO2 flux to the atmosphere roughly equal to the net…

Carbon cost of plant-microbe interactions under drought

Lead Institution

Los Alamos National Laboratory

Principal Investigator

John Dunbar

Project type

FICUS Research

Plant survival during environmental stress is a major driver of ecosystem carbon (C) cycling, and plant-microbe interactions are central to plant stress survival. However, quantifying how much C…

Bacterial:Fungal Interactions in Soil: Developing a mechanistic understanding of nutrient exchange between soil microbes and the resulting consequences for C/N cycling

Lead Institution

Los Alamos National Laboratory

Principal Investigator

Patrick Chain

Project type

FICUS Research

Little is known about the interactions between bacteria and fungi and how they function in the cycling of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) in soils. Here we seek to characterize at the molecular level the…

Discover ectomycorrhizal fungi-triggered macro- and micronutrient reactions and movements: From cell to ecosystem function

Lead Institution

University of Florida

Principal Investigator

Hui-ling Liao

Project type

FICUS Research

As the critical members of forest microbiome, ectomycorrhizal fungi (EMF) play important roles in forest ecosystems. EMF provide their tree hosts with macro- and micronutrients in exchange for…

Beyond the rhizosphere: Microbial functional traits through the whole soil profile and their response to warming.

Lead Institution

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Principal Investigator

Eoin Brodie

Project type

FICUS Research

The pathways of carbon transport and loss through and from soils--soil organic matter (SOM) depolymerization to dissolved organic carbon and mineralization to carbon dioxide (CO2)--are fundamentally…

Expanding the functional metagenomics toolkit with CRAGE and CRISPR-Cas9 in taxonomically diverse microbial host chassis

Lead Institution

University of British Columbia

Principal Investigator

Steven Hallam

Project type

FICUS Research

Plant and microbial biomass offers a renewable alternative to energy and materials produced from oil. The industrial scale production or biorefining of sugars and aromatic compounds from biomass…

Gene function discovery in photosynthesis: A multi-omics approach

Lead Institution

University of California, Berkeley

Principal Investigator

Sabeeha Merchant

Project type

FICUS Research

Photosynthesis is the defining characteristic of plants enabling the capture and transformation of sunlight into bioenergy and has been the focus of plant research for centuries. Remarkably, whole…

Rhizosphere effects on soil organic matter decomposition and microbial activity in a tropical rainforest under drought: unearthing aggregate- to ecosystem-scale contributions to carbon cycling through whole-ecosystem stable isotope labeling

Lead Institution

University of Arizona

Principal Investigator

Malak Tfaily

Project type

FICUS Research

Interactions at the plant-soil-microbe nexus are difficult to track given the complex networks of species and metabolites involved, in addition to the general challenges to studying heterogeneous and…

Prediction of response in soil microbiome carbon utilization to changing moisture conditions

Lead Institution

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Principal Investigator

Jason McDermott

Project type

FICUS Research

The goal of this project is to attain a systems level understanding of the soil microbiome and its phenotypic response to changing moisture through a tractable, spatially explicit examination of the…

Characterization of Self-Incompatibility in the Bioenergy Grass Miscanthus

Lead Institution

HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology

Principal Investigator

Kankshita Swaminathan

Project type

FICUS Research

Miscanthus is a widely adapted high biomass perennial grass, commonly grown as an ornamental, that shows promise as a bioenergy crop. Most available Miscanthus lines, including the high yielding…

Plant-mycorrhizal-decomposer interactions under climate change: the role of shifting plant carbon allocation

Lead Institution

Boston University

Principal Investigator

Jennifer Bhatnagar

Project type

FICUS Research

Ectomycorrhizal fungi (EMF) that associate with the roots of live plants can control the growth rate of their hosts and the amount of nutrients and carbon (C) that are recycled through soil (e.g., as…

Characterization of simplified soil communities with high and low carbon use efficiency across differing moisture treatments

Lead Institution

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Principal Investigator

Vanessa Bailey

Project type

FICUS Research

This project is directed under the "Terrestrial Microbial Carbon Cycling" SFA project awarded to Los Alamos National Laboratory. The goal of the SFA is to interrogate how soil microbial…