Kirsten S. Hofmockel

Oct 25, 2024 | onlinelibrary.wiley.com | Amy Zimmerman |Emily Graham |Jason McDermott |Kirsten S. Hofmockel

1 Introduction Microorganisms (including bacteria, archaea, fungi, and protists) are major drivers of terrestrial carbon cycling, controlling the balance between carbon storage in soil organic matter (see Box 1 for glossary) and CO2 release to the atmosphere (Liang, Schimel, and Jastrow 2017 and references therein). A growing body of indirect evidence suggests that the soil virosphere is an essential component of soil carbon cycling (Emerson et al. 2018; Graham et al. 2024; Lee et al.

Sep 17, 2024 | nature.com | Megan Foley |Noah W. Sokol |Benjamin J. Koch |Steven J. Blazewicz |Michaela Hayer |Kirsten S. Hofmockel | +4 more

AbstractMeasuring the growth rate of a microorganism is a simple yet profound way to quantify its effect on the world. The absolute growth rate of a microbial population reflects rates of resource assimilation, biomass production and element transformation—some of the many ways in which organisms affect Earth’s ecosystems and climate.

Jun 19, 2024 | nature.com | Emily Graham |Antonio Pedro Camargo |Ruonan Wu |Russell Neches |Nikos Kyrpides |Jason McDermott | +1 more

AbstractHistorically neglected by microbial ecologists, soil viruses are now thought to be critical to global biogeochemical cycles. However, our understanding of their global distribution, activities and interactions with the soil microbiome remains limited. Here we present the Global Soil Virus Atlas, a comprehensive dataset compiled from 2,953 previously sequenced soil metagenomes and composed of 616,935 uncultivated viral genomes and 38,508 unique viral operational taxonomic units.

Sep 6, 2023 | biorxiv.org | Jiwoo Kim |Kirsten S. Hofmockel |Caroline A. Masiello |Li Lu

AbstractSoil microbial communities with reduced complexity are emerging as model systems for studying consortia-scale phenotypes. To establish synthetic biology tools for studying these communities in hard-to-image environmental materials, we evaluated whether a single member of a model soil consortium (MSC) can be programmed to report on gene expression without requiring matrix disruption.

Jul 15, 2023 | nature.com | Michaela Hayer |Kirsten S. Hofmockel |Benjamin J. Koch |Jennifer Pett-Ridge |Bruce A. Hungate |Jeth Walkup

AbstractPredicting ecosystem function is critical to assess and mitigate the impacts of climate change. Quantitative predictions of microbially mediated ecosystem processes are typically uninformed by microbial biodiversity. Yet new tools allow the measurement of taxon-specific traits within natural microbial communities. There is mounting evidence of a phylogenetic signal in these traits, which may support prediction and microbiome management frameworks.