Technical Report Department of Energy Grant #SC0004335 “Tracking Down Cheaters. Molecular Analysis of Carbon Consumption by Organisms That Do Not Contribute to Extracellular Enzyme Pools”

Technical Report · Sun May 31 04:00:00 EDT 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1247653· OSTI ID:1247653

Blackwood, Christopher ^[1]

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1. Kent State Univ., Kent, OH (United States); Kent State University

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 “cheating”, 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.

• Research Organization: Kent State Univ., Kent, OH (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER) (SC-23)
• DOE Contract Number: SC0004335
• OSTI ID: 1247653
• Report Number(s): DOE-KENT--04335-1
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
bioinformatics
decomposition
feature selection
gene classification
gene expression
microbial physiology
microbiology
soil organic matter