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...

Particle-based crystallization is an important pathway to synthesize advanced materials with complex structures. Unlike monomer-by-monomer addition or Ostwald ripening, particle-based crystallization occurs via particle-by-particle addition to form larger crystals. This chapter reviews 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...

The radiolysis of liquid water and the radiation-matter interactions that happen in aqueous environments are important to the elds of chemistry, materials, and environmental sciences, as well as biological and physiological response to extreme conditions and medical treatments. The initial stage of...

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...

In highly alkaline “water-in-salt” Na2O/Al2O3/H2O solutions where the monomeric Al(OH)4– anion dominates, isolation of transitional species that seed crystallization of sodium aluminate salt hydrates has been challenging. For example, discrimination of dimeric [for example, Al2O(OH)62–] species via...