As part of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s (PNNL) Science Focus Area program, we are investigating the impact of environmental change on microbial community function in grassland soils. Three grassland soils, representing different moisture regimes, were selected for ultra-deep...

"DNA Viral Diversity, Abundance, and Functional Potential Vary across Grassland Soils with a Range of Historical Moisture Regimes" Soil viruses are abundant, but the influence of the environment and climate on soil viruses remains poorly understood. Here, we addressed this gap by comparing the...

Aluminate salts precipitated from caustic alkaline solutions exhibit a correlation between the anionic speciation and the identity of the alkali cation in the precipitate, with the aluminate ions occurring either in monomeric (Al(OH)4–) or dimeric (Al2O(OH)62–) forms. The origin of this correlation...

Understanding the reactivity behavior of aluminum oxyhydroxide phases, widely present in nuclear waste tanks, in radiation environments is essential to develop better nuclear waste processing approaches. Recent experiments using vibrational sum frequency generation, a surface sensitive technique...

The molecular speciation of aluminum (Al3+) in alkaline solutions is fundamental to its precipitation chemistry within a number of industrial applications that include ore refinement and industrial processing of Al wastes. Under these conditions, Al3+ is predominantly Al(OH)4–, while at high [Al3+]...

A major challenge in biotechnology and biomanufacturing is the identification of a set of biomarkers for perturbations and metabolites of interest. Here, we develop a data-driven, transcriptome-wide approach to rank perturbation-inducible genes from time-series RNA sequencing data for the discovery...

"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...