Multi-‘omic’ analyses of the dynamics, mechanisms, and pathways for carbon turnover in grassland soil under two climate regimes
- Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States); UC Berkeley
Soil microbial activity drives the carbon and nitrogen cycles and is an important determinant of atmospheric trace gas turnover, yet most soils are dominated by microorganisms with unknown metabolic capacities. This knowledge gap precludes meaningful predictions of relationships between microorganism types and their biogeochemical functions. Specifically, as climate change physically alters terrestrial ecosystems, the impact on microbial consortia and potential consequences for release of carbon and other nutrients from soils are difficult to predict. In this project, we investigated the identities, activity, and functional potential of microorganisms residing in a well characterized grassland ecosystem (the Angelo Coast Range Reserve) undergoing a controlled 14-year rainfall extension climate change experiment. The research was achieved using a combination of “omics”-based technologies, including genome-resolved metagenomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics. The approach allowed us to capture multiple facets of community ecology and activity in situ. Supported by this award, significant progress was made in addressing the grand challenge of achieving genome-resolution for very complex soil microbial communities. In addition to improvements in the methodology, the research required new approaches to define the 3-dimentional distributions of microorganisms and their metabolic traits in soils and to decipher the impact of climate. Underpinning such analyses was the need for sufficient statistical power to test for geographic, soil depth and rainfall controls on community composition and metabolic properties. This required that we scale up throughput substantially. We overcame significant technical barriers to achieve complex microbial community resolution.
- Research Organization:
- Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER)
- DOE Contract Number:
- SC0010566
- OSTI ID:
- 1504276
- Report Number(s):
- UCB--10566
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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