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

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…

Identification of root-specific terpenoids, mediators in the plant-microbe interaction in the rhizosphere

Lead Institution

Michigan State University

Principal Investigator

Bjoern Hamberger

Project type

Exploratory Research

The sorghum root microbiome undergoes profound changes during drought, so does its expression of terpene metabolism. Using an artificial root system (rhizotron) with sorghum grown in field soil, it…

SynThetic BiolOgy Driven Approach to Repurpose PolyaMides (STORM)

Lead Institution

Battelle Memorial Institute

Principal Investigator

Kate Kucharzyk

Project type

Exploratory Research

Nylon-6 (PA6) is a polyamide polymer abundant in clothing, ropes, fabrics, and automobile parts. The U.S. annual consumption of PA6 is ~0.5 million metric tons with manufacturing yields of 2.9 kg of…

Developing a protocol for spatial metabolomics to investigate cell types in the Sorghum bicolor stem

Lead Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Principal Investigator

Amy Marshall-Colon

Project type

Exploratory Research

Sorghum bicolor is an important bioenergy crop because it has high nutrient and water use efficiency, and produces a large quantity of biomass that can be processed into ethanol for biofuels. Many…

Microbial Distributions Related to Carbon Retention, Heavy Metals, and Pore Structure in Serpentine Soils

Lead Institution

Michigan State University

Principal Investigator

Matthew Schrenk

Project type

Exploratory Research

Serpentinizing terranes are a widespread, yet understudied site of key biogeochemical transformations, particularly along continental margins. Ultramafic bedrock, originating at the seafloor and…

Employing synthetic soil environments to test the impact of freeze-thaw and pore geometry on iron, phosphorus, and carbon interactions in permafrost-affected soil

Lead Institution

University of Tennessee

Principal Investigator

Erin Rooney

Project type

Exploratory Research

Arctic warming is accelerating permafrost thaw, exposing previously frozen soil to repeated freeze-thaw disturbance. Freeze-thaw cycles can alter the physical and geochemical environment with…

ModEx Benchmark: AI for Benchmarking Model-Experiment Integration Workflows

Lead Institution

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Principal Investigator

Maruti K. Mudunuru

Project type

Exploratory Research

Recently, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER) launched and concluded the Artificial Intelligence for Earth System Predictability (AI4ESP)…

Rhizosphere Promoted Rock Weathering and Nutrient Cycling in Deep Shale Fractures

Lead Institution

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Principal Investigator

Benjamin Gilbert

Project type

Exploratory Research

This project seeks to use EMSL metabolomic and imaging approaches to determine the biogeochemical processes driven by plant roots (sagebrush and lupin) in deep, fractured weathering shale, to test…

Pore-scale evidence of tidal wetland soil carbon stabilization

Lead Institution

U.S. Geological Survey

Principal Investigator

Lisamarie Windham-Myers

Project type

Exploratory Research

The high capacity of vegetated coastal ecosystems to preserve organic carbon is well documented but remains poorly understood at a mechanistic level, challenging emerging efforts to account for…

An improved understanding of coral skeletons as environmental proxies and biomaterials by mapping organics and water at the nanoscale

Lead Institution

Saint Olaf College

Principal Investigator

Anne Gothmann

Project type

Exploratory Research

Scleractinian coral skeletons are highly sensitive to environmental change, can record environmental transformations through their geochemistry, and are of economic importance due to the habitat and…

Revealing the secretome and enriching the function of newly established hyperthermophilic microbial communities with superior cellulolytic and hemicellulolytic activities

Lead Institution

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Principal Investigator

Pavlo Bohutskyi

Project type

Exploratory Research

Vast amount of organic waste materials is generated in U.S. These carbon-containing waste streams represent a potentially valuable but underutilized feedstock for production of carbon-neutral…

Understanding cell wall remodeling processes of grass root system formation and function for sustainable biofuel production

Lead Institution

Washington State University

Principal Investigator

Karen Sanguinet

Project type

Exploratory Research

Root ideotypes that improve water and nutrient uptake been a major target for improvement of climate resilience in bioenergy grasses. Here we propose to use EMSL’s state of the art capabilities to…

Determination of Valance Band Offset in Sr2TiO4/SrTiO3 heterostructures

Lead Institution

Pennsylvania State University

Principal Investigator

Jeff Haeni

Project type

Exploratory Research

The ultimate goal of this research is the creation of a 2D electron gas in heterostructures comprised of members of the Sr-Ti-O Ruddlesden Popper homologous series. An understanding of the…

Biomineralization peptides structure and function

Lead Institution

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Principal Investigator

Wendy Shaw

Project type

Exploratory Research

My work includes looking at biomineralization peptides on inorganic surfaces to determine their structure and relate that to function. In order to do this, I must confirm that I have a pure peptide…

Measurement of Absolute Infrared Absorption Cross Sections of Nitric Acid

Lead Institution

NASA Ames Research Center

Principal Investigator

Charles Chackerian

Project type

Exploratory Research

We will use EMSL's Bruker IFS 120 high resolution infrared spectrometer to measure the absolute infrared absorption cross sections of nitric acid in the mid and far infrared regions.

High Resolution Infrared Spectroscopy of Boron Trifluoride

Lead Institution

Private (Maki)

Principal Investigator

Arthur Maki

Project type

Exploratory Research

We will use EMSL's Bruker high resolution infrared spectrometer to measure the rotationally resolved spectrum of several isotopic species of boron trifluoride in the mid and near infrared…

High Resolution Infrared Spectroscopy of Boron Trifluoride

Lead Institution

Private (Maki)

Principal Investigator

Arthur Maki

Project type

Exploratory Research

We will use EMSL's Bruker high resolution infrared spectrometer to measure the rotationally resolved spectrum of several isotopic species of boron trifluoride in the mid and near infrared…

Infrared Spectroscopy of Water Clusters in a Supersonic Slit Jet Expansion

Lead Institution

Idaho State University

Principal Investigator

Lisa Goss

Project type

Exploratory Research

We will create small water clusters in a slit jet supersonic expansion and study the structure of these clusters using high resolution Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy.

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