Project: Viruses in soils: Key modulators of microbiomes and nutrient cycling?
The activity of microbes in soil profoundly affects global energy and nutrient cycles. Substantial recent work in environmental microbiology has taught us that viruses are a key driver of microbial ecology in other systems, and we expect the same to hold true in soil. But soil is a complex milieu – highly structured, chemically and physically heterogenous, and resistant to extrapolation. Thus, even as new methods have revolutionized our understanding of microbial and viral ecology in other systems, our understanding of soil microbial ecology has lagged, and our understanding of soil viral ecology is still further behind. Our objective is to develop paradigms for understanding the role of viruses in soil ecology, and to build the tools – scalable new methods, new databases, and new model systems – to test these paradigms. This project is lead by Matthew Sullivan (OSU), with national and international collaborators: Sarah Bagby (Case Western University), Paul Hyman (Ashland University), Sanggu Kim (OSU), Sylvain Moineau (Université Laval, Canada), Vivek Mutalik (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories), Trent Northern (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories), Ben Temperton (University of Exeter), Malak Tfaily (University of Arizona), Eoin Brodie (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories), Dale Pelletier (Oak Ridge National Laboratories).
For access to project resources (members only), click here.
