Soil Slab: Tracking Microbes’ Contribution to Climate Warming
The image above depicts a detail from a soil slab under study by UMass Amherst biologist and genome expert Jeffrey Blanchard and microbial ecologist Kristen DeAngelis. The image shows how different and separate the organic layer is (top) from the mineral layer (bottom). About 10,000 microbe species can usually be found in a gram of soil, about the size of a sugar cube. With a new high-throughput DNA sequencing grant shared with the University of New Hampshire and the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, the researchers are investigating the impact of a warmer climate on microbes and their production of greenhouse gases. Learn more.
Photo credit: Kristen DeAngelis Research Group