During an IQ Biology backpacking trip, I talked with several students in the geology department about their ongoing projects, and we dreamed up collaborations that I thought would never come to fruition. But, don't dream up big science ideas around go-getters unless you want something to happen. Geology PhD student, Tristan Caro, quickly brought me onto his soil microbial turnover project to do some marker gene sequencing work in the background of his main project. My role was to elucidate the microbial community composition so that Tristan could associate the lipids he measured to the groups of organisms in the soil that could be producing them. We had talked on the hike about how challenging it is to draw conclusions from lipid-based studies without that community composition data because for some reason or other you always want to know who is there.
In return, Tristan added biocrusts to the turnover project to allow me to see how adding water to the communities impacts their growth rate - with some of the fastest turnover rates measured for the biocrust cyanobacteria as compared to multiple other soil types. This was expected. We usually see rapid green-up and growth of the cyanobacteria community upon rewetting, but it was really cool to see the rate of that growth as compared to other community members and to see how dry-down affected the lipid composition of the soil as well. I look forward to working with Tristan in the future. Here is the preprint of our work Here is the published version of this work.
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AuthorSierra is a graduate student in the Barger Lab at CU Boulder studying microbial ecology for dryland restoration. Archives
August 2023
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