Publications by authors named "Evan P Starr"
Article Synopsis
- The study focuses on the interactions within the rhizosphere soil of Avena fatua plants and how they relate to soil health and productivity, utilizing stable-isotope tracing and genome sequencing.
- Researchers extracted and sequenced DNA from both rhizosphere and nonrhizosphere soils at different growth stages, yielding 55 unique bacterial genomes and evidence of microeukaryotes and phages that are involved in carbon turnover.
- Findings suggest that these microorganisms, particularly phages, play crucial roles in processing plant-derived carbon, affecting plant signaling, pathogenic interactions, and overall soil ecology.
Article Synopsis
- Predation plays a crucial role in ecosystems, impacting food webs, energy flow, and nutrient cycling, though most research has focused on larger predators rather than microscopic ones like bacteria.
- This study found that obligate predatory bacteria exhibited significantly higher growth and carbon uptake (36% and 211% more, respectively) compared to nonpredatory bacteria across various environments, while facultative predators showed only slightly enhanced rates.
- The research indicates that increased energy flow in microbial communities boosts the role of predatory bacteria, suggesting that more productive environments lead to stronger predatory influence on lower trophic levels.
Bacteria isolated from soils are major sources of specialized metabolites, including antibiotics and other compounds with clinical value that likely shape interactions among microbial community members and impact biogeochemical cycles. Yet, isolated lineages represent a small fraction of all soil bacterial diversity. It remains unclear how the production of specialized metabolites varies across the phylogenetic diversity of bacterial species in soils and whether the genetic potential for production of these metabolites differs with soil depth and vegetation type within a geographic region.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFViruses impact nearly all organisms on Earth, with ripples of influence in agriculture, health, and biogeochemical processes. However, very little is known about RNA viruses in an environmental context, and even less is known about their diversity and ecology in soil, 1 of the most complex microbial systems. Here, we assembled 48 individual metatranscriptomes from 4 habitats within a planted soil sampled over a 22-d time series: Rhizosphere alone, detritosphere alone, rhizosphere with added root detritus, and unamended soil (4 time points and 3 biological replicates).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The transformation of plant photosynthate into soil organic carbon and its recycling to CO by soil microorganisms is one of the central components of the terrestrial carbon cycle. There are currently large knowledge gaps related to which soil-associated microorganisms take up plant carbon in the rhizosphere and the fate of that carbon.
Results: We conducted an experiment in which common wild oats (Avena fatua) were grown in a CO atmosphere and the rhizosphere and non-rhizosphere soil was sampled for genomic analyses.