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...

Elmore JR, Dexter GN, Baldino H, Huenemann JD, Francis R, Peabody GL 5th, Martinez-Baird J, Riley LA, Simmons T, Coleman-Derr D, Guss AM, Egbert RG. High-throughput genetic engineering of nonmodel and undomesticated bacteria via iterative site-specific genome integration. Sci Adv. 2023 Mar 10;9(10)...

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+]...

The rhizosphere represents a dynamic and complex interface between plant hosts and the microbial community found in the surrounding soil. While it is recognized that manipulating the rhizosphere has the potential to improve plant fitness and health, engineering the rhizosphere microbiome through...

Agriculture is the largest source of greenhouse gases (GHG) production. Conversion of nitrogen fertilizers into more reduced forms by microbes through a process known as biological nitrification drives GHG production, enhances proliferation of toxic algal blooms, and increases cost of crop...

Metabolite exchange between plant roots and their associated rhizosphere microbiomes underpins plant growth promotion by microbes. Sorghum bicolor is a cereal crop that feeds animals and humans and is used for bioethanol production. Its root tips exude large amounts of a lipophilic benzoquinone...

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...