Projects

As a scientific user facility, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) provides expertise, instrumentation, and resources to 250 projects each year.

EMSL projects displayed on the EMSL web site project page reflect project abstracts and information migrated to this page before April 30, 2024. To review current and past EMSL user projects, visit EMSL Science Central.™

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…

Composition characterization of ZnO:Cr & ZnO:Co

Lead Institution

University of Washington

Principal Investigator

Bradley Roberts

Project type

Exploratory Research

Thin film samples of ZnO:Cr and ZnO:Co have been grown via the co-sputtering method. Our initial magnetic measurements indicate that ZnO:Cr is ferromagnetic up to and above room temperature which is…

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…

Model Development on Using Clay Membranes for Arsenic Removal from Drinking Water

Lead Institution

University of Missouri - Columbia

Principal Investigator

Baolin Deng

Project type

Exploratory Research

The ability of fine-grained clay minerals to act as semi-permeable membranes and restrict the passage of dissolved solutes is well documented. This unique property of clay, often referred to more…

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…

Model Development on Using Clay Membranes for Arsenic Removal from Drinking Water

Lead Institution

University of Missouri - Columbia

Principal Investigator

Baolin Deng

Project type

Exploratory Research

Use of clay membranes for arsenic removal from drinking water has been explored at the University of Missouri-Columbia, supported by a CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation. Arsenic is a…

MBE growth of epitaxial anatase TiO2 (001) on STO(001) on Si(001) and characterization of TiO2 films

Lead Institution

University of Washington

Principal Investigator

Kelli Griffin

Project type

Exploratory Research

The proposed visit to the EMSL facilities at PNNL is for the observation of the oxygen plasma assisted molecular beam epitaxy (OPA-MBE) deposition process of epitaxially grown anatase TiO2 on SrTiO3…

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…

Assess fate of plant-originated C and N - contribution of switchgrass to soils with contrasting pore size distributions

Lead Institution

Michigan State University

Principal Investigator

Alexandra Kravchenko

Project type

Limited Scope

The CO2 and N2O emissions from agricultural soils are an important component of global greenhouse gas emissions, but are hard to accurately estimate. The primary cause is high spatial and temporal…

Solving the Structure of Eukaryotic Type III Glutamine Synthetase Assembles

Lead Institution

Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory

Principal Investigator

James Evans

There are three major classes of the enzyme Glutamine Synthetase (GS) that share widely conserved active-site residues but vary in average protein length, oligomeric assembly state and cofactor…

An Integrated Omics Guided Approach to Lignification and Gravitational Responses: The Final Frontier

Lead Institution

Washington State University

Principal Investigator

Norman Lewis

Integrated “omics” approaches are increasingly urgently needed to robustly pursue incisive hypotheses in biological systems, while concomitantly gaining better understanding of global ramifications…

Exploration of the Effects of Particle Size and Mixed Oxidation State on the Stability of CeO2 Nanoparticles

Lead Institution

Washington State University

Principal Investigator

Xiaofeng Guo

Project type

Limited Scope

Actinide dioxide (AnO2) nanoparticles, a by-product of modern nuclear reactor operation, have been demonstrated to be mobile in the environment. These particles have been shown to have a complex…

Dissecting bacterial secretion systems in situ with electron cryo-tomography

Lead Institution

California Institute of Technology

Principal Investigator

Grant Jensen

Pathogenic bacteria use specialized “nanomachines” to identify and interact with host cells. These machines are attractive drug targets because they are surface-exposed, widespread, and vital for…

HTLV-1 intasome structural studies

Lead Institution

University of Minnesota

Principal Investigator

Hideki Aihara

Integrase (IN) is an essential viral enzyme that catalyzes the integration of reverse-transcribed retroviral DNA into the host’s chromosome, and human immunodeficiency virus type-1 (HIV-1) IN is the…

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