Posts

Congratulations Casey on being a William B. & Dorothy Heroy Research Grant recipient from the Geological Society of America! Casey will be using the funds for field work in Colorado later this summer. Basically, more of this:

A new collaborative paper with researchers at Pacific Northwest National Lab was recently published in Nature Communications. The work focuses on carbon processing during groundwater – surface water mixing in the hyporheic zone of the Columbia River in Washington State. Link here.

Slightly belated post….but nonetheless, congratulations to Anne Booker for being awarded the Elizabeth M. Mote outstanding teaching award at the Microbiology Department end-of-year gathering. The award recognizes outstanding effort in undergraduate teaching.

Zhijiao Di is visiting the Wilkins Lab for the year to learn more about molecular microbiology approaches such as 16S rRNA gene surveys and metagenomics. She is currently a graduate student at the China University of Geosciences in Wuhan, China. Welcome Zhijiao!

Some work out of our laboratory – led by graduate student Robert Danczak – was recently published in the journal Microbiome. Here, we sampled groundwater in aquifers across central and southern Ohio and, using assembly-based metagenomics – recovered genomes from many phyla within the CPR. To place these results in a larger context, we subsequently performed a meta-analysis of all available CPR genomes to assess their carbon processing potential, revealing phyla-specific trends. These results reveal that CPR are seemingly ubiquitous in groundwater systems, and play key roles in carbon and nitrogen cycles in these environments. See the publication here for more details.

Symbols at the branch-ends indicate CPR genomes recovered from Ohio aquifers in this study.

Earlier in the summer Anne Booker gave a TedX presentation at OSU on her shale research – watch below for the talk!

A new paper led by Anne Booker has just been published in mSphere. In the manuscript, Anne describes a series of experiments to demonstrate that Halanaerobium strains – which can dominate hydraulically fractured shale environments – are able to generate sulfide via the reduction of thiosulfate. The work has important implications for the hydraulic fracturing process, where sulfidogenesis is viewed as a deleterious process.

The paper is here

And an accompanying ASM blog post about the work is here

Ally Brady – an OSU undergraduate in the School of Earth Sciences – has joined the Wilkins Lab over the summer as part of the Shell Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program at OSU. She’ll be working with some of the microorganisms that have been isolated from hydraulically-fractured deep shale ecosystems. Welcome Ally!

David Morgan, an OSU graduate via the microbiology program, has joined with Wilkins Lab as a staff researcher. He’ll be working on the interactions between microorganisms that persist in hydraulically-fractured shale ecosystems and a range of biocides. The work is performed in partnership with Dow Microbial Control. Welcome David!

Casey Saup and colleagues were recently at our East River research site, just outside Crested Butte, CO. Casey is investigating riverbed biogeochemistry (this time, under trying circumstances given the amount of water in the river…). Pictures below.