Metagenomics is unearthing the previously hidden world of soil viruses. Many soil viral sequences in metagenomes contain putative auxiliary metabolic genes (AMGs) that are not associated with viral replication. Here, we establish that AMGs on soil viruses actually produce functional, active proteins...
Introduction: Understanding how microorganisms within a soil community interact to support collective respiration and growth remains challenging. Here, we used a model substrate, chitin, and a synthetic Model Soil Consortium (MSC-2) to investigate how individual members of a microbial community...
ABSTRACT Climate change is causing an increase in drought in many soil ecosystems and a loss of soil organic carbon. Calcareous soils may partially mitigate these losses via carbon capture and storage. Here, we aimed to determine how irrigation-supplied soil moisture and perennial plants impact...
Abstract Microbial response to changing environmental factors influences the fate of soil organic carbon, and drought has been shown to affect microbial metabolism and respiration. We hypothesized that the access of microbes to different carbon pools in response to dry–rewet events occurs...
ABSTRACT Fungal mineral weathering regulates the bioavailability of inorganic nutrients from mineral surfaces to organic matter and increase the bioavailable fraction of nutrients. Such weathering strategies are classified as biomechanical or biochemical. In the case of fungal uptake of mineral...
The soil microbiome’s role in regulating biogeochemical processing is critical to the cycling and storage of soil organic carbon (C). The function of the microbiome under different land management uses has become a focal area of research due to the interest in managing soil C to mitigate climate...
Primary publication pre-print. Cite as: arXiv:2410.09346 [q-bio.MN]
Citation: Mejia-Rodriguez D, Kim H, Sadler N, Li X, Bohutskyi P, Valiev M, Qian WJ, Cheung MS. PTM-Psi: A python package to facilitate the computational investigation of post-translational modification on protein structures and their impacts on dynamics and functions. Protein Sci. 2023 Dec;32(12)...
Citation : Reichart NJ, Steiger AK, Van Fossen EM, McClure R, Overkleeft HS, Wright AT. Selection and enrichment of microbial species with an increased lignocellulolytic phenotype from a native soil microbiome by activity-based probing. ISME Commun. 2023 Sep 30;3(1):106. doi: 10.1038/s43705-023...
The research goal of this project is to establish model synthetic microbial communities to understand the rules regulating their biological function in order to utilize them as next generation bioproduction platforms capable of reducing carbon and nitrogen footprints in biomanufacturing processes.
"Moisture modulates soil reservoirs of active DNA and RNA viruses" Soil is known to harbor viruses, but the majority are uncharacterized and their responses to environmental changes are unknown. Here, we used a multi-omics approach (metagenomics, metatranscriptomics and metaproteomics) to detect...
The soil microbiome performs many functions that are key to ecology, agriculture, and nutrient cycling. However, because of the complexity of this ecosystem we do not know the molecular details of the interactions between microbial species that lead to these important functions. Here, we use a...
Two factors that are well-known to influence soil microbiomes are the depth of the soil as well as the level of moisture. Previous works have demonstrated that climate change will increase the incidence of drought in soils, but it is unknown how fluctuations in moisture availability affect soil...
The research goal of this project is to develop new theory and tools that leverage evolutionary perspectives and knowledge of the energetics of reactions to predict the most likely regulation in a given environment. These methods will accelerate exploration, modeling and understanding of cell...
