Viruses impact microbial systems through killing hosts, horizontal gene transfer, and altering cellular metabolism, consequently impacting nutrient cycles. A virus-infected cell, a "virocell," is distinct from its uninfected sister cell as the virus commandeers cellular machinery to produce viruses rather than replicate cells. Problematically, virocell responses to the nutrient-limited conditions that abound in nature are poorly understood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNon-structural carbohydrates (NSCs) are building blocks for biomass and fuel metabolic processes. However, it remains unclear how tropical forests mobilize, export, and transport NSCs to cope with extreme droughts. We combined drought manipulation and ecosystem 13CO2 pulse-labeling in an enclosed rainforest at Biosphere 2, assessed changes in NSCs, and traced newly assimilated carbohydrates in plant species with diverse hydraulic traits and canopy positions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWetlands store 20-30% of the world's soil carbon, and identifying the microbial controls on these carbon reserves is essential to predicting feedbacks to climate change. Although viral infections likely play important roles in wetland ecosystem dynamics, we lack a basic understanding of wetland viral ecology. Here 63 viral size-fraction metagenomes (viromes) and paired total metagenomes were generated from three time points in 2021 at seven fresh- and saltwater wetlands in the California Bodega Marine Reserve.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDrought impacts on microbial activity can alter soil carbon fate and lead to the loss of stored carbon to the atmosphere as CO and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Here we examined drought impacts on carbon allocation by soil microbes in the Biosphere 2 artificial tropical rainforest by tracking C from position-specific C-pyruvate into CO and VOCs in parallel with multi-omics. During drought, efflux of C-enriched acetate, acetone and CHO (diacetyl) increased.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Microbiomes are now recognized as the main drivers of ecosystem function ranging from the oceans and soils to humans and bioreactors. However, a grand challenge in microbiome science is to characterize and quantify the chemical currencies of organic matter (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAs direct mediators between plants and soil, roots play an important role in metabolic responses to environmental stresses such as drought, yet these responses are vastly uncharacterized on a plant-specific level, especially for co-occurring species. Here, we aim to examine the effects of drought on root metabolic profiles and carbon allocation pathways of three tropical rainforest species by combining cutting-edge metabolomic and imaging technologies in an in situ position-specific C-pyruvate root-labeling experiment. Further, washed (rhizosphere-depleted) and unwashed roots were examined to test the impact of microbial presence on root metabolic pathways.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSevere droughts endanger ecosystem functioning worldwide. We investigated how drought affects carbon and water fluxes as well as soil-plant-atmosphere interactions by tracing CO and deep water HO label pulses and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in an enclosed experimental rainforest. Ecosystem dynamics were driven by different plant functional group responses to drought.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFmosses dominate peatlands by employing harsh ecosystem tactics to prevent vascular plant growth and microbial degradation of these large carbon stores. Knowledge about -produced metabolites, their structure and their function, is important to better understand the mechanisms, underlying this carbon sequestration phenomenon in the face of climate variability. It is currently unclear which compounds are responsible for inhibition of organic matter decomposition and the mechanisms by which this inhibition occurs.
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