Soil microorganisms play fundamental roles in cycling of soil carbon, nitrogen, and other nutrients, yet we have a poor understanding of how soil microbiomes are shaped by their nutritional and physical environment. In this study, we investigated the successional dynamics of a soil microbiome during...

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...

The soil microbiome is central to the cycling of carbon and other nutrients and to the promotion of plant growth. Despite its importance, analysis of the soil microbiome is difficult due to its sheer complexity, with thousands of interacting species. Here, we reduced this complexity by developing...

"Deconstructing the Soil Microbiome into Reduced-Complexity Functional Modules" The soil microbiome represents one of the most complex microbial communities on the planet, encompassing thousands of taxa and metabolic pathways, rendering holistic analyses computationally intensive and difficult. Here...

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...

he production and release of H2 and O2 during and after electron (100–1000 eV) irradiation of boehmite nanoplatelet films was studied. H2 and O2 produced during irradiation likely correspond to electron-induced dissociation of the hydroxyls primarily in the terminal surface layers of the boehmite...

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+]...

X-ray, energetic photon, and electron irradiation can ionize and electronically excite target atoms and molecules. These excitations undergo complicated relaxation and energy-transfer processes that ultimately determine the manifold system responses to the deposited excess energy. In weakly bound...

The accurate description of excited vibronic states is important for modeling a wide range of photoinduced processes. The nuclear–electronic orbital (NEO) approach, which treats specified protons on the same level as the electrons, can describe excited electronic–protonic states. Herein the...