Technical Report Department of Energy Grant #SC0004335 âTracking Down Cheaters. Molecular Analysis of Carbon Consumption by Organisms That Do Not Contribute to Extracellular Enzyme Poolsâ
The overriding objective of our work is to integrate physiological and community ecology of belowground organisms into understanding of soil carbon dynamics to improve predictions of terrestrial ecosystem models. This includes using metagenomics and metatranscriptomics-based methods to understand microbial interactions affecting decomposition and soil carbon dynamics. The focus of the majority of the work directly related to this project was on âcheatingâ, a poorly understood microbial interaction with a potentially large effect on decomposition. Model organisms were used to determine the types of organisms that cheat based on their known niche and genomic characteristics. In addition, we study plant and microbial traits and plant-microbe interactions that affect species distributions and soil carbon, and also develop bioinformatics tools to increase the power of ecological inferences that can be obtained from omics-based sequence data.
Blackwood, Christopher. Technical Report Department of Energy Grant #SC0004335 â Tracking Down Cheaters. Molecular Analysis of Carbon Consumption by Organisms That Do Not Contribute to Extracellular Enzyme Poolsâ . 2015-01-01.